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About The Book My Father’s Paradise is Ariel Sabar’s quest to reconcile present and past. As Father and son travel together to today’s postwar Iraq to find what’s left of his father’s birthplace. Ariel brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, telling his family’s story and discovering his own role in this sweeping saga. What he finds in the Sephardic Jew’s millennia-long survival in Islamic lands is an improbable story of tolerance and hope. Read an article Ariel wrote about his father’s relationship to his son Unraveling the ties among the main characters in My Father's Paradise can at times be tricky. Click here to download a selective one-page family tree (PDF). Praise for My Father’s Paradise "Graceful and resonant . . . A personal undertaking for a son who admits he never understood his unassuming, penny-pinching immigrant father, a man who spent three decades obsessively cataloging the words of his moribund mother tongue. Sabar once looked at his father with shame, scornful of the alien who still bore scars on his back from childhood bloodlettings. This book, he writes, is a chance to make amends." – New York Times Sunday Book Review "If Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise were only about his father's life, it would be a remarkable enough story about the psychic costs of immigration. But Sabar's family history turns out to be more than the chronicle of one man's efforts to retain something of his homeland in new surroundings. It's also a moving story about the near-death of an ancient language and the tiny flicker of life that remains in it. . . . The chapters describing Yona's budding success as a linguist are thrilling." – Washington Post Book World "A wonderful, enlightening journey, a voyage with the power to move readers deeply even as it stretches across differences of culture, family, and memory." – Christian Science Monitor “A powerful story of the meaning of family and tradition inside a little-known culture.” – San Francisco Chronicle About The Author Ariel Sabar covered the 2008 presidential campaigns for The Christian Science Monitor and is an award-winning former staff writer for The Baltimore Sun and The Providence (RI) Journal. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Monthly, and many other publications. My Father's Paradise, his debut book, won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, and was a Philadelphia Inquirer "staff pick," a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, a Christian Science Monitor "Best Nonfiction Book of 2008," and an Elle magazine Readers Prize Selection. It also won the Rodda Book Award, given by the Church and Synagogue Library Association once every three years to the adult book that best "exhibits excellence in writing and has contributed significantly to congregational libraries through promotion of spiritual growth." Ariel lives with his wife and children in Washington, DC. For more about Ariel, please visit his website at www.arielsabar.com Read an Interview with the Author! Bibliography Articles: “Evening in Jerusalem” New York Times. Aug 15, 2008 “A Time to Put Aside the Armor” New York Times. July 17, 2009 “Backstory: On The Road (Literally) Again” The Christian Science Monitor. May 24, 2006 “Backstory: Dangerous waters” The Christian Science Monitor. July 24, 2006 “One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Two Bit ‘Trashball’” New York Times. Apr 29, 2007 “The Washington Metro: A Country Kid’s New Playground” The Christian Science Monitor Sept 14, 2007
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