Alfombra voladora sobre Bagdad. La lucha de una mujer por dos huérfanas de guerra. (The Flying Carpet of Small Miracles

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 took up the cause of numerous hospitalized children grievously wounded in the bombing. 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. 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 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. [Recommended for large public libraries and bookstores.—Ed.] [PW 4/13/09]