An emotionally arresting, thoughtful account about the soul of Afghanistan.
A memoir of a man who grew up in Afghanistan, left for 30 years and returned to help after the country was ravaged by war.
Debut author Sharif departed Afghanistan in 1976 for an education abroad and didn’t come back until three decades had passed. After the U.S. invasion of the country following the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, Sharif joined a special State Department program to become a diplomat, which in turn led him back to Kabul. However, he found Afghanistan all but unrecognizable, torn asunder by war, tribal conflict and a Taliban hellbent on thwarting the establishment of a stable democracy. The book is a series of letters he wrote to family and friends while on assignment in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011. The epistles are bittersweet, enlivened by the author’s joy at finally returning to the place of his birth but also darkened by his realizations that the object of his fond remembrances was now plagued by strife. In one particularly poignant passage, Sharif recounts meeting a barber who turned out to be the grandson of the barber who cut the author’s hair when he was a young child. Interspersed among such personal recollections are meditations on the principal sources of Afghanistan’s troubles and what strategies could conceivably bring relief. He also provides a running commentary on other subjects, such as the core principles of “Pomegranate Diplomacy,” Muslim dietary restrictions, and important but elusive cultural terms and practices. Along the way, Sharif often writes elegiacally about his country: “It is certainly a tall order and a pipe dream on my part to want to restore the current society to some semblance of Afghanistan’s forgotten Golden Era.” The book closes with an epilogue in which the author reflects on the death of his father and, by extension, the decline of his homeland.
An emotionally arresting, thoughtful account about the soul of Afghanistan.Pub Date: July 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499388305
Page Count: 176
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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