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General Kamel Sachet was one of Saddam Hussein's commanders in his Special Forces, in charge of Kuwait City during Desert Storm, and a governor in the province of Maysan. Over the course of two years in Baghdad, Wendell Steavenson came to know Sachet, his wife and their nine children closely, and began to unravel their stories. The Weight of a Mustard Seed tells of a father with a glittering military career, a decorated hero with a private conscience; of a wife who acquiesces to her husband's increasing religiosity; of young, ideological sons whose religious fervor grows increasingly dangerous; and of daughters who must bow to their father's rigid moral strictures. 'In Iraq there was never one story, there were always many stories, layers of episodes, each one a wound.' As Steavenson gradually reveals the emotional and psychological scars left on one family after decades spent living with war and repression, so too does she reach toward the heart of a previously unspoken story of a once prosperous nation, reduced by Hussein's megalomania and paranoia to bankruptcy, corruption and impotence.>
