Memoir Monday... Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo

The cover photo captured my heart, of an innocent child, happy and smiling even though the world around her is hard to understand sometimes. In a Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War, author Annia Ciezadlo tries to make sense of it all for us as she opens up a window into a world usually hidden to outsiders.

From Inside the Jacket... In the fall of 2003, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. Over the next six years, while living in Baghdad and Beirut, she broke bread with Shiites and Sunnis, warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. Day of Honey is her memoir of love, conglict and the hunger for food and friendship - a communion that feeds the soul as much as the body in times of war. As an American journalist married to a Lebanese man, she had an insider's view of these turbulent years, and she takes us inside the everyday life of two cities at war.

Living and reporting from occupied Baghdad, Ciezadlo longs for normal married life. She finds it in Beirut, her husband's hometown, a city slowly recovering from years of civil war. But as the young couple settles into their new home, and begins to discover the pleasures of food and family, the bloodshe they escaped in Iraq spreads to Lebanon and reawakens the terrible specter of sectarian violence. In lucid, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and rituals of eating to illuminate a vibrant Middle East that most Americans never see.

A luminous portrait of life in the Middle East, Day of Honey weaves history, cuisine and firsthand reporting into a fearless, intimate exploration of everyday survival.

I am so looking forward to reading this book! Just from sampling the writing, I know I'm in for a treat as Ciezadlo gives us a different view of war - from the everyday lives of the people she lived with and got to know, sharing their rituals and foods with us! (Yes, there are these wonderful recipes in the back of the book- actually pages and pages of them!) Sharing with us how they deal with the chaos around them while living as normal a life as possible.

I want to thank Free Press and Simon & Schuster for sending along a review copy! Look for my review next month. If you'd like to read this right now, Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo is available from your favorite bookstore! *P.S. This Book is Kindle Ready!

Memoir Monday... Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda

Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda

When thinking of Lawrence of Arabia, visions of a man in flowing white robes in a desert landscape will usually come to mind. But what of the real man? Of his real accomplishments? Michael Korda's book, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, has gotten high praise for illuminating this legendary man, T.E. Lawrence, a scholar and an archaeologist, who was sent to Cairo as a young man and helped unite the Arab tribes to defeat the Turks.

Michael Korda's Hero is the story of an epic life on a grand scale: a revealing, in-depth, and gripping biography of the extraordinary, mysterious, and dynamic Englishman whose daring exploits and romantic profile—including his blond, sun-burnished good looks and flowing white robes—made him an object of intense fascination, still famous the world over as "Lawrence of Arabia."... In illuminating Lawrence's achievements, Korda digs further than anyone before him to expose the flesh-and-blood man and his contradictory nature. Here was a born leader who was utterly fearless and seemingly impervious to pain, thirst, fatigue, and danger, yet who remained shy, sensitive, mod-est, and retiring; a hero who turned down every honor and decoration offered to him, and was racked by moral guilt and doubt; a scholar and an aesthete who was also a bold and ruthless warrior; a writer of genius—the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one of the greatest books ever written about war—who was the virtual inventor of modern insurgency and guerrilla warfare; a man who at the same time sought and fled the limelight, and who found in friendships, with everyone from Winston Churchill to George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, from Nancy Astor to Noël Coward, a substitute for sexual feelings that he rigorously—even brutally and systematically—repressed in himself.

For history buffs, as well as people who enjoy biographies, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, should satisfy. I myself am looking forward to diving into this one. Not only to really learn about T.E. Lawrence, but to understand the political atmosphere that existed in the Middle East during WW I.