Swimming Up the Tigris: Real Life Encounters with Iraq

By Barbara Nimri Aziz. 'An intelligent and insightful book that offers readers a compelling look inside Iraq and the personal lives and thoughts of individual Iraqis, providing the reader with an understanding of Iraq's humanity that is never covered in our media.' - Aseel Dyck, Iraqi-American historian, librarian, activist, and scholar.

Aziz's vantage point is unique: she is a journalist, an anthropologist, and an Arab woman. As a freelance journalist, she exposes the mainstream press's failure to cover the embargo-an unprecedented story that even today has many implications for the current conflict-and offers revealing insights into the embargo history. As a social anthropologist, Aziz examines every aspect of Iraqi culture that was systematically attacked and destroyed by both the embargo and the incasion. And as an Arab, she understands teh etraordinary will of the Iraqi people and their deeprooted love for their country. As Aziz points out, in that sense Iraqis are little different from Americans.