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The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad  (130)
$10.39
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The Sewing Circles of Herat : A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan by Christina Lamb  (20)
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The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra (46)
$10.40
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A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan by Nelofer Pazira (10)
$10.20
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Winter in Kandahar by Steven E. Wilson (88)
$10.17
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Born in England and raised on her father's fantastic stories of an Afghanistan she had never known, Shah spends her adult life searching for a mythic place of beauty. "Any Western adult might have told me that this was an exile's tale of a lost Eden: the place you dream about, to which you can never return. But even then, I wasn't going to accept that." What she finds is a place ravaged by decades of war, poverty and, later, religious puritanism. Shah first visits Afghanistan in 1986 as a war correspondent at the remarkable age of 21 and later returns as the documentary producer of Beneath the Veil, an expos‚ of life under the Taliban that predated the national interest in the embattled country. Her journey forces her to reconcile the vast disparities between fact and fiction, the world she has pieced together from her father's tales and the reality she glimpses from behind the grille of the Taliban-imposed burqa. Shah weaves legends and traditional sayings into her text, lending a greater context to her expectations and experiences. She also offers a piecemeal history of Afghanistan to accompany the accounts of her travels, but for readers unfamiliar with the many years of political tumult Afghanistan has suffered, the history may not be thorough enough. Most compelling are the characters she encounters and their indomitable spirit, including a woman with 10 children who asks her about a "magic" pill to prevent pregnancy, and her husband, whose intense machismo is not enough to save him from the war.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In April 2001, Shah, a journalist, traveled to Kabul to secretly document Taliban atrocities in Afghanistan. The result was the documentary film Beneath the Veil. But this was not Shah's first visit. Raised in England, her vision of her father's homeland was nurtured by romantic legends of pleasure gardens and noble mujahideen. When she made her first trip in 1986, a harrowing journey from Peshawar through the Hindu Kush to the front lines in the war with the Soviet Union, she was "chasing a myth." But by the time the Taliban took over in 1996, the disintegration of the myth was almost complete. Beneath the Veil shows the suffering, in particular, of three young sisters, and Shah's trip to do a follow-up report after U.S. air strikes began was also a personal mission to rescue the girls--efforts defeated as much by domestic exigency and centuries-old habits of mind as by larger forces: "Afghanistan had confounded me, just as it has always confounded the West." In this very personal inside-outside account, Shah is our eye on a culture and set of conditions that are much more complex than what we see on the nightly news. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
Born in England and raised on her father's fantastic stories of an Afghanistan she had never known, Shah spends her adult life searching for a mythic place of beauty. "Any Western adult might have told me that this was an exile's tale of a lost Eden: the place you dream about, to which you can never return. But even then, I wasn't going to accept that." What she finds is a place ravaged by decades of war, poverty and, later, religious puritanism. Shah first visits Afghanistan in 1986 as a war correspondent at the remarkable age of 21 and later returns as the documentary producer of Beneath the Veil, an expos‚ of life under the Taliban that predated the national interest in the embattled country. Her journey forces her to reconcile the vast disparities between fact and fiction, the world she has pieced together from her father's tales and the reality she glimpses from behind the grille of the Taliban-imposed burqa. Shah weaves legends and traditional sayings into her text, lending a greater context to her expectations and experiences. She also offers a piecemeal history of Afghanistan to accompany the accounts of her travels, but for readers unfamiliar with the many years of political tumult Afghanistan has suffered, the history may not be thorough enough. Most compelling are the characters she encounters and their indomitable spirit, including a woman with 10 children who asks her about a "magic" pill to prevent pregnancy, and her husband, whose intense machismo is not enough to save him from the war.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In April 2001, Shah, a journalist, traveled to Kabul to secretly document Taliban atrocities in Afghanistan. The result was the documentary film Beneath the Veil. But this was not Shah's first visit. Raised in England, her vision of her father's homeland was nurtured by romantic legends of pleasure gardens and noble mujahideen. When she made her first trip in 1986, a harrowing journey from Peshawar through the Hindu Kush to the front lines in the war with the Soviet Union, she was "chasing a myth." But by the time the Taliban took over in 1996, the disintegration of the myth was almost complete. Beneath the Veil shows the suffering, in particular, of three young sisters, and Shah's trip to do a follow-up report after U.S. air strikes began was also a personal mission to rescue the girls--efforts defeated as much by domestic exigency and centuries-old habits of mind as by larger forces: "Afghanistan had confounded me, just as it has always confounded the West." In this very personal inside-outside account, Shah is our eye on a culture and set of conditions that are much more complex than what we see on the nightly news. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
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