Eager Iraqi readers struggle for access to books

[grassfed]

Iraqis are book lovers. So much so that there’s a saying in the Arab world: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Iraq reads. But lately it’s been hard for Iraqis to lay their hands on the books that they crave.

Reporting from Iraq for McClatchy Newspapers, Corinne Reilly writes that throughout Iraq, “Libraries and schools are understocked, and many bookstores are closed…. College-level texts, books on specialized subjects and recent editions are the hardest to come by. Most elementary and high school students use decades-old materials.”

“You could say we are starving for textbooks,” May Youssef Saour, a microbiology professor at Baghdad University’s al-Kindy College of Medicine, told Reilly.

Apparently the problem is not just the result of the recent years of fighting in Iraq. According to Reilly, access to books began to drop off under Saddam Hussein. Although his regime offered free education to all Iraqis, it also banned certain books. Then, after Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, sanctions slowed the flow of new books into Iraq.

more
http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2009/04/14/eager-iraqi-readers-struggle-for-access-to-books/