Word: steavenson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lesser reporter than Steavenson (a former TIME colleague) would have found the task of building a story around an absent protagonist too daunting. The book examines the darkness at the heart of Saddam's Iraq: the ever-present fear and the collaboration with evil it engendered...
...also an untimely one: five years later, in 2003, journalist Wendell Steavenson arrived in Iraq to "learn more about the locked-in years of Saddam's regime" and chose Sachet as the prism through which those years might best be refracted. In the resulting book, The Weight of a Mustard Seed (the title is a quote from the Koran), she tries to understand why Iraqis who deplored what was happening to their country became Saddam's accomplices. "How," she asks, "do ordinary little human cogs make up a torture machine...
Among Iraq's élite, Steavenson encountered "varying shades of hypocrisy." No one "ever looked me straight in the eye and admitted responsibility for the crimes of the government which they had served." Even Sachet, a loving father and God-fearing soldier, ordered the execution of officers. "When the penalty of death becomes commonplace, perhaps it becomes unremarkable to order it," Steavenson observes...
...their hands—and the Americans respond by throwing the both off the bridge. One drowns. It’s a shocking incident, and the film sets out to unravel its repercussions. The boy’s funeral, complete with stilted expository dialogue from journalist-turned-screenwriter Wendell Steavenson and faux Middle Eastern music by Jeff Beal, is meant to point at the strained social hierarchy in Samarra. Yet just as the film is taking shape as a careful exposition of Iraqi local politics, it changes course, styling itself as both thriller and romance. Enter Anna Molyneux (Connie Nielson...