Review: Day Of Honey By Annia Ciezadlo

Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War
By Annia Ciezadlo


Product Details
Free Press, February 2011
Hardcover, 400 pages
ISBN-10: 1416583939
ISBN-13: 9781416583936


Description (From Simon and Schuster) 

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 the hunger for food and friendship—a communion that feeds the soul as much as the body in times of war.

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 just as the young couple settles into a new home, the bloodshed they escaped in Iraq spreads to Lebanon and reawakens the terrible specter of sectarian violence. In lucid, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and the rituals of eating to illuminate a vibrant Middle East that most Americans never see. We get to know people like Roaa, a determined young Kurdish woman who dreams of exploring the world, only to see her life under occupation become confined to the kitchen; Abu Rifaat, a Baghdad book lover who spends his days eavesdropping in the ancient city's legendary cafÉs; Salama al-Khafaji, a soft-spoken dentist who eludes assassins to become Iraq's most popular female politician; and Umm Hassane, Ciezadlo's sardonic Lebanese mother-in-law, who teaches her to cook rare family recipes—which are included in a mouthwatering appendix of Middle Eastern comfort food. As bombs destroy her new family's ancestral home and militias invade her Beirut neighborhood, Ciezadlo illuminates the human cost of war with an extraordinary ability to anchor the rhythms of daily life in a larger political and historical context. From forbidden Baghdad book clubs to the oldest recipes in the world, Ciezadlo takes us inside the Middle East at a historic moment when hope and fear collide. Day of Honey is a brave and compassionate portrait of civilian life during wartime—a moving testament to the power of love and generosity to transcend the misery of war.

About the Author

Born in Chicago, Annia Ciezadlo grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. She received her Master's in journalism from New York University in 2000. In late 2003, she left New York for Baghdad, where she worked as a stringer for The Christian Science Monitor and other publications for the next year. During this time, she wrote groundbreaking stories, about parliamentary quotas for women, Baghdad's graffiti wars, militant Islamist poetry slams, the flight of the country's Christian minority, and Iraq's first reality tv show. Her first-person piece on what it's like to go through checkpoints in Baghdad earned a flood of responses, and is now used by the US military to help prevent civilian casualities. Since then, she has reported on revolutions in Lebanon, crackdowns in Syria, repression in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the 2006 "summer war" between Israel and Hezbollah. Although she has covered several wars, Annia does not describe herself as a war correspondent. She specializes in articles about Arab culture and civil society, stories that explore the intersections between larger political realities and everyday activities like driving, cooking, and going to school.

She has written about culture, politics, and the Middle East for The New Republic, The Nation, The Washington Post, the National Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Observer, and Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper. Annia lives somewhere between New York and Beirut, with her husband, the journalist Mohamad Bazzi.

My Thoughts:
Day of Honey is an absolutely mesmerizing read!  Annia Ciezadlo's storytelling abilities are astounding; each page is illuminated with the sights, sounds, and aromas of a worn-torn Middle East.  But don't be fooled...this is far from a political memoir!  The effects of war are portrayed in such a humanitarian manner and one that focuses on the essence of daily survival...food.  Through her representation of the local food, Ciezadlo brings perspective to the culture and the landscape that is the Middle East.  I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and was easily swept away to another time and place.  In the end, I gained a great deal of insight and understanding of an often misunderstood people and culture.  With the current events taking place in the Middle East, this book is a must read for anyone who desires a greater understanding!  Ciesadlo's writing is a true gift to behold and I easily give this memoir a 5! 

 Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book as part of the Free Press Blog Tour in exchange for my honest review.

Book Review: The Memory Palace By Mira Bartok

The Memory Palace By Mira Bartok

Product Details
Free Press, January 2011
Hardcover, 320 pages
ISBN-10: 1439183317
ISBN-13: 9781439183311

(This review is posted in conjunction with The Free Press Blog Tour. I received a free copy of this memoir in exchange for my honest opinion)

Product Description (Courtesy of Simon and Schuster Publishing): 

" People have abandoned their loved ones for much less than you've been through," Mira BartÓk is told at her mother's memorial service. It is a poignant observation about the relationship between Mira, her sister, and their mentally ill mother. Before she was struck with schizophrenia at the age of nineteen, beautiful piano protÉgÉ Norma Herr had been the most vibrant personality in the room. She loved her daughters and did her best to raise them well, but as her mental state deteriorated, Norma spoke less about Chopin and more about Nazis and her fear that her daughters would be kidnapped, murdered, or raped. 

When the girls left for college, the harassment escalated—Norma called them obsessively, appeared at their apartments or jobs, threatened to kill herself if they did not return home. After a traumatic encounter, Mira and her sister were left with no choice but to change their names and sever all contact with Norma in order to stay safe. But while Mira pursued her career as an artist—exploring the ancient romance of Florence, the eerie mysticism of northern Norway, and the raw desert of Israel—the haunting memories of her mother were never far away.

Then one day, Mira's life changed forever after a debilitating car accident. As she struggled to recover from a traumatic brain injury, she was confronted with a need to recontextualize her life—she had to relearn how to paint, read, and interact with the outside world. In her search for a way back to her lost self, Mira reached out to the homeless shelter where she believed her mother was living and discovered that Norma was dying.

Mira and her sister traveled to Cleveland, where they shared an extraordinary
reconciliation with their mother that none of them had thought possible. At the hospital, Mira discovered a set of keys that opened a storage unit Norma had been keeping for seventeen years. Filled with family photos, childhood toys, and ephemera from Norma's life, the storage unit brought back a flood of previous memories that Mira had thought were lost to her forever.

 

My Review:
Every now and then I'm fortunate enough to encounter a book that is not only elegantly written but also profoundly thought-provoking.  The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok is one of those treasured books and could easily be classified as a literary masterpiece.  Intertwined with the author's drawings and elegantly written prose, as well as the often obscure journal entries of her mentally-ill mother, Bartok provides the reader with an in-depth passage into a world that teeters between profound genius and hopeless insanity; a world in which two young sisters must not only navigate but eventually try to escape. Burdened with guilt and left in a constant state of wonder to what is true and what is a fiction of her mother's illness, Bartok reveals the challenges she and her sister endured and the ever-changing lack of adequate provisions of a defunct mental heath system.

But to suggest that this is simply a memoir of growing up with a schizophrenic mother, would be missing the overall point of this memoir completely.  It's a memoir about memories and how to capture and hold on to those memories whether good or bad.  The basic premise is "how will we remember our loved ones once they are no longer with us or when our own memory begins to fail us?"  Thus, begins the construction of The Memory Palace...a place to capture our deepest and most profound memories.

This has certainly been one of the most mesmerizing and refreshing books that I have encountered in a very long time. My perception of the homeless and mentally-ill, which all too often go hand in hand, will forever be altered.  I highly recommend this book and assure you it will stay with you long after you've read the last page.  I easily give this book a 5 star rating.

Please visit thememorypalace.com for more information 

*The Cleveland Women's Shelter that was home for Bartok's mother for several years, has now been re-named in her honor:

The Norma Herr Women's Center

As An Added Side Note:
Living in the Cleveland area myself brought this book even closer to home for me.  I will be attending a reading by Mira Bartok on Friday February 4th in Cleveland and will be sure to share this experience with you as well.  For now, I thought I would include a couple of my favorite places in Cleveland that were frequented by the author as well and appear in her memoir:

 The Cleveland Museum of Art

Saint Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral