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Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islam Women
Geraldine Brooks, 1994
272 pp.

In Brief
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women is the story of Brook's intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. In fundamentalist Iran, Brooks finagles an invitation to tea with the ayatollah's widow - and discovers that Mrs. Khomeini dyes her hair. In Saudi Arabia, she eludes the severe segregation of the sexes and attends a bacchanal, laying bare the hypocrisy of this austere, male-dominated society. In war-torn Ethiopia, she watches as a female gynecologist repairs women who have undergone genital mutilation justified by a distorted interpretation of Islam. In villages and capitals throughout the Middle East, she finds that a feminism of sorts has flowered under the forbidding shroud of the chador as she makes other startling discoveries that defy our stereotypes about the Muslim world. Nine Parts of Desire is much more than a captivating work of firsthand reportage; it is also an acute analysis of the world's fastest-growing religion, deftly illustrating how Islam's holiest texts have been misused to justify the repression of women. It was, after all, the Shiite leader Ali who proclaimed that "God created sexual desire in ten parts, then gave nine parts to women. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author

• Birth—1955
• Where—outside Sydney, Australia
• Education—B.A., Sydney University; M.A. Columbia
   University (USA)
• Awards—Hal Boyle Award, Overseas Press Club, 1990; Nita
   B. Kibble Award, 1997; Pulitizer Prize, 2006 (for March).
• Currently—Virginia, USA


Geraldine Brooks is the author of March, Year of Wonders and the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. A former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Brooks lives in rural Virginia with her husband, author Tony Horwitz, and their son.

More
Brooks was born in 1955 and grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. She attended Sydney University and worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. As the Greg Shackleton Memorial Scholar she completed a Master's Degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York City in 1983. Subsequently Brooks worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans — in 1990, for coverage of the Persian Gulf, Brooks (with Tony Horwitz) received the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award for "Best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad".

Brooks was awarded a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for 2006.

Brooks married fellow Pulitzer recipient, Tony Horwitz, in Tourette-sur-loup, France, in 1984. They have a son, Nathaniel, and divide their time between homes in Virginia, United States and Sydney, Australia.

Her first book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994), based on her experiences among the Muslim women of the Middle East, was an international bestseller, translated into 17 languages. Foreign Correspondence (1997), which won the Nita B. Kibble Award for women's writing, was a memoir and travel adventure about a childhood enriched by penpals from around the world, and her adult quest to find them.

Her first novel, Year of Wonders, published in 2001, is an international bestseller. Set in 1666, Year Of Wonders follows a young woman's battle to save her fellow villagers and her soul when the plague suddenly strikes the small Derbyshire village of Eyam.

Her second novel, March, was published in late February 2005. An historical novel set during the U.S. Civil War, it chronicles the war experiences of the March girls' absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. The parallel novel was generally well received by the critics. In December 2005 March was selected by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction works published during the year. In April 2006, the book earned Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

March seems to have had its roots in Brooks' childhood. A copy of Little Women was given to Brooks when she was only ten years old, by her mother Gloria, a journalist and radio announcer. (From Wikipedia.)

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Critics Say. . .
Geraldine Brooks has drawn on her wide experience and first hand knowledge of Islam and the Middle East to contribute a number of commentaries on current events in the region.
Salon


Having spent six years covering the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal, Brooks presents an exploration of the daily life of Muslim women and the often contradictory forces that shape their lives.
Publishers Weekly



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