As an outcome of her successful tour in the US, Samar Yazbek’s book was on September 16th, ranked #1 in its category!

Refusing to play Assad’s sectarian games in Syria
By David Ignatius, for the Washington Post, September 19th, 2012
If you want to put a face on the Syrian revolution, try an activist named Samar Yazbek. I had a chance to talk with her when she visited Washington this week, and she brought the cause of the opposition — and its raw human passion for liberation — into focus.

The 42-year-old writer is a very unlikely revolutionary, certainly an unexpected presence among the Free Syrian Army.

Yazbek’s is not a crafted memoir but an immediate record of three months of fear, torture, intimidation and, eventually, flight from her home told through diaries that stop and start, sometimes repeat, and always offer another detail of popular will and regime cruelty. Its importance is in its existence, the effort of so many Syrians to share their stories and Yazbek’s own courage and ability to record them. It is a hard, painful read, not only for what Yazbek witnesses and suffers but also for that of the other Syrians that she interviews. Their testimonies come through on the page as atrocities happen all around her.

IT was not yet 5 on Tuesday morning. I was lying on one side of the bed and the two little girls I was watching were on the other. None of us had slept a wink. Snipers’ gunfire rang out from time to time; bombs were crashing all around us. The girls’ frightened mother entered the room. “The bombing is getting worse,” she said.

We ran out, heading downstairs. Women and children and some men had gathered in the shelter. The children were now capable of distinguishing between the sound of bombs and gunfire, between distant and nearby shelling, and they could discern the direction from which it was all coming

Many have criticized the “hasty” Arabic literature that has emerged in the last 16 months, blossoming in both bookstores and online during the ongoing Arab revolutions… And yet there is something about the intersection of literature and real life that compels readers to keep searching for books that resonate with, and expand beautifully on, the current moment — without cheapening either the literature or the moment.

Syrian novelist and TV host Samar Yazbek’s “A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution” is one of these rare books.