There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famously bookish, intellectual city. There's an old saying that Cairo writes,… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
Part of the reason you see so little about this in the Western media is that Iraq was closed off from the outside world for so long under Saddam. But I think there's a deeper reason, which is that it… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
Americans are curious about the texture of everyday life in the Middle East because they rarely get to see it. I wanted readers to… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
In the Middle East, bread is so essential to everyday life that word for it in Egyptian Arabic is aish, which means life. It's… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
There's a long history in the Middle East of "bread intifadas," starting with 1977 in Egypt, when Anwar Sadat tried to lift bread subsidies. People rebelled and poured into Tahrir Square, shouting slogans against the government just like they did earlier this year. Sadat learned his lesson and kept bread subsidies in place, and so did a host of other… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share
But how can you understand a war without any knowledge of the society where it happens? It's like trying to understand birth without knowing… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
I chose to write about food: food is inherently political, but it's also an essential part of people's real lives. It's where the public… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
The Middle East is the only region in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa where rates of malnutrition actually rose over the past decade or two, instead of falling. — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share
For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event.… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
The problem is that so many of them are not getting told. This is a massive problem, not just in the Middle East but… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
As a journalist, or an anthropologist, the convention is that people are there for you to study, and they are your objects. — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
But being an American woman married to an Arab guy - and a Muslim to boot! - put me in a different category. People… — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share Image
There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book. — Annia Ciezadlo Copy Share
![“Americans are curious about the texture of everyday life in the Middle East because they rarely get to see it. I wanted readers to feel like they were sitting around the dinner table with me and my friends, hearing what average people really say and really think, [where] the dinner table is the…” quote by Annia Ciezadlo](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/732/annia-ciezadlo-21699_average_americans-are-curious-about-the-texture_51011.jpg)
