Now in paper!

A memoir with recipes.

Wife, mother, and war correspondent Anna Badkhen shares her experiences in the world’s most dangerous places and the memorable recipes that capture the human dimension of her travels.

As war correspondents go, Anna Badkhen has as much to tell as the best of them: walking through a blown-up tunnel at 11,000 feet, driving across minefields, and being locked up with Taliban fighters. But in addition to all these gripping stories and many more, Peace Meals touches on something else--the universal language of food and its capacity to transcend the dehumanizing realities of war.

By taking readers through the places she has visited as a war journalist, Badkhen offers a kind of history of the political strife that has racked the world from Afghanistan to Chechnya over the past decade. Throughout her narrative, however, emerges a theme of touching humanity that only a mother could offer, whether it is her habit of comparing the children she meets with her own, or the self-examination she undergoes when debating whether to tell her family about the horrors she has seen. At the end of every chapter can be found the feature that sets this book apart and that drives home the author’s message of simple, enduring truths: a recipe of some exotic meal that Badkhen shared with the ordinary people she knew in extraordinary circumstances, offering the rest of us a palpable--and very palatable--dimension to an unforgettable odyssey.

Few books, if any, have ever been so nail-biting, thought-provoking, and mouth-watering at the same time. Written with warmth and a passion for life, Peace Meals is an ingeniously different work of modern journalism.