La nieta de la Maharaní (Spanish Edition) - Softcover

In this stirring, frank account, Jaber, a Lebanese-British foreign correspondent depicts her professional work covering the Gulf War and her personal engagement with an Iraqi family caught tragically in the crossfire. Reporting for London's Sunday Times on the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Jaber, accompanied by her British photographer husband, Steve Bent, took up the cause of numerous hospitalized children grievously wounded in the bombing and helped start a fund to provide them with better medical attention and supplies. In particular, Jaber learned the extraordinary story of two orphans, the only survivors in a family of seven children who had been engulfed in the firestorm with their parents while fleeing their Baghdad neighborhood in April 2003. Three-year-old Zahra was burned over most of her body and in dire need of sophisticated emergency attention, while her baby sister, Hawra, tossed from a car window, survived unscathed. Jaber, with the help of young American journalist Marla Ruzicka (who eventually died in a car bombing), was able to get Zahra airlifted out, though she later died in an American military hospital. Jaber felt keenly for these orphans, as she had endured years of personal turmoil attempting to get pregnant in her marriage, and she proposed to the girls' grandmother that she adopt them. Jaber demonstrates in this affecting work how she employed her professional passion to aid Iraq's war victims.

Maha Akhtar (b. 1966) is a journalist, author, and speechwriter. A contributor to "Departures" magazine, she also writes about wine for several influential restaurateurs in New York City. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, Akhtar started her career in the music business as assistant manager for the Cure. Six years later, she moved into public relations for Zagat Survey before entering CBS News, where she worked closely with Dan Rather on the "CBS Evening News". Akhtar wrote two memoirs, "La nieta de la maharani" ("The Granddaughter of the Maharani", 2009) and "La princesa perdida" ("The Lost Princess", 2011), before publishing her first novel, "Miel y almendras" ("Salon Rules") in Spain and Latin America in 2012, followed by "Las huellas en el desierto" ("Footprints in the Desert") in 2014. Akhtar lives in New York City.