Meredith May

An eloquent and haunting act of witness to horrors beyond grimmest fiction, and a thing of towering beauty. More importantly, it is a story that must be told, and a richly textured view into an overlooked conflict and misunderstood region. I, Who Did Not Die is the untold story of the children and young men whose lives were sacrificed at the whim of vicious dictators and pointless, barbaric wars.

Little has been written of the Iran-Iraq war, which was among the most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century, one fought with chemical weapons, ballistic missiles, and cadres of child soldiers.

The numbers involved are staggering:
—All told, it claimed 700,000 lives—200,000 Iraqis, and 500,000 Iranians.
—Young men of military service age—eighteen and above in Iraq, fifteen and above in Iran—died in the greatest numbers.
—80,000 Iranian child soldiers were killed, mostly between the ages of sixteen and seventeen.
—The two countries spent a combined 1.1 trillion dollars fighting the war.

Rarely does this kind of reportage succeed so power- fully as literature.

Meredith May spent sixteen years as a feature writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, where her 2004 narrative series on a war-wounded Iraqi boy won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.