The Weight of a Mustard Seed
Wendell Steavenson
What motivates a man to serve a leader like Saddam Hussein, so brutal to both enemies and allies?
How did Hussein’s men live and, most importantly, how did they live with themselves?
General Kamel Sachet was one of these men: a respected commander in Saddam Hussein’s Special Forces.
During a year in Baghdad searching for answers, Wendell Steavenson comes to know Sachet and his family intimately. She discovers a decorated military hero with a private conscience; his university-educated wife, withdrawn into the security of hijab; sons whose religious fervour becomes increasingly dangerous; and daughters with prospects subverted by war and tyranny.
As Steavenson reveals the scars left on one family after decades of war and repression, so too she reaches towards the heart of a once-prosperous nation reduced by Hussein’s megalomania and paranoia to corruption, bankruptcy and impotence.
The Weight of a Mustard Seed is a gripping, revelatory work of literary non-fiction—a tale of the decline of one man, his family and their nation.
Praise for The Weight of a Mustard Seed:
‘Wendell Steavenson’s beautifully written book is an eye-opening, heart-wrenching inquiry into the banality of evil.’
Nancy Huston
'A rare and compelling narrative. Far more chilling than all the blood-and-guts accounts so far published, Steavenson’s book should be a must-read on Iraq.’
Sunday Times
‘Wendell Steavenson’s book takes a step back from all the post-war mayhem and offers a compelling, deeply disturbing and meticulously constructed portrait of Saddam’s regime from the inside…It is a tribute to her reporting skills, not to mention her bravery, that she has realized such an engrossing, multifaceted and empathetic biography, so much so that by the time General Sachet’s life ends…the reader has come to sympathise with a man who enjoyed power and status at the very top of Saddam’s regime…A superbly reported survey of the architecture of state terror and one of the most powerful books to come out of Iraq in recent years.’
Literary Review
Wendell Steavenson
Wendell Steavenson was born in New York in 1970 and grew up in London. She wrote for Time magazine before moving to Georgia, where she lived for two years in Tbilisi.
