Byline: HADANI DITMARS

Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace:

Surviving Under Saddam,

Dying in the New Iraq

By Michael Goldfarb

Carroll & Graf, 348 pages, $32.50

The Insider:

Trapped in Saddam's Brutal Regime

By Ala Bashir

With Lars Sigurd Sunnana

Abacus, 305 pages, $30

Between Two Worlds

Escaping from Tyranny:

Growing up in the Shadow

of Saddam

By Zainab Salbi

and Laurie Becklund

Gotham, 334 pages, $36

As Saddam Hussein awaits his fate, three autobiographical accounts of life under his Baathist regime offer uniquely personal perspectives on Iraq's last two tragic decades.

But what comes across in Michael Goldfarb's Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace, Ala Bashir's The Insider and Zainab Salbi's Between Two Worlds is not only the legacy of war, sanctions and invasions, or the beastliness of Saddam's regime, but the individual stories of survival. After all Iraqis have been through and continue to endure, these books speak to their incredible spirit and resilience.

I started my descent into other people's Iraqi odysseys as a fellow traveller -- albeit one who only arrived for the first time in 1997, during the dog days of the embargo.

Neither an insider nor entirely an outsider myself, I found the narratives to be instructive in their perspectives and resonant, in different ways, with my own.

Goldfarb, a U.S. National Public Radio correspondent who skillfully recounts the tale of his Kurdish translator Ahmad -- imprisoned by Saddam and then murdered soon after the U.S. invasion -- writes with a radio reporter's keen eye for visual detail, but never seems to really penetrate Iraqi society, maintaining his American-liberal bias throughout; Ala Bashir, Saddam's private physician and an acclaimed artist, writes of the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war and the nightmarish excesses of the regime, but tempers such tales with typically Iraqi black humour; and Zainab Salbi, once the privileged daughter of Saddam's personal pilot, offers a glimpse into the world of the Baathist elite from a young woman's point of view, and later from a returning exile's.

I began my literary journey with Goldfarb's book, and would in fact recommend it as a primer for eager students of Iraq for its historical overview of the country. But in terms of more modern history, Goldfarb does tend to downplay the complicity of the United States in propping up Saddam, and staunchly defends the recent invasion on the grounds that it got rid of him, although he does admit that the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Britain whored after Saddam as if he were the world's most beautiful courtesan rather than one of its most brutal dictators.

But Goldfarb is good at painting evocative scenes of Kurdistan, a land steeped in "fire and oil," as he puts it, alluding to both its ancient Zoroastrian fire worship and its modern petroleum wealth.

There is something annoyingly American, however, about his generalizations, describing the bright and quirky Ahmad as "the rarest of things in Arab lands -- an individual." One senses that Goldfarb has not spent enough time in...