Sharp, memorable portraits of the myriad struggles of young people from Afghanistan.
A reporter’s intensive interviews with a diverse generation of Afghans over the last 20 years.
Rasmussen, a London-based journalist who covers Afghanistan, Iran, and European security affairs for the Wall Street Journal, offers poignant explorations of Afghan lives over two tumultuous decades. Since the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001 after the U.S. invasion and occupation, there was a massive attempt at rebuilding the decimated country, bringing modernization efforts that began to include girls and women successfully into the education system. Many Afghans that had fled the first Taliban regime, such as Zahra’s and Saif’s families, migrating to Iran, returned by the early 2000s and attempted to rebuild their lives. Zahra was married off as a young teen and physically abused by her opium-addicted husband. Eventually, she was able to extricate herself from an oppressive tribal system and find education and employment. With her two children, she just managed to escape Kabul when the Americans evacuated in August 2021. Alex, a gay man who had spent his early years in Peshawar—where his family had moved to escape the Taliban—hoped to open the first gay bar in Kabul but had to abandon his dreams when the political situation grew more repressive by the 2010s. During that time, Omari became a Taliban soldier and witnessed an emergent Islamic State group before joining the triumphant Taliban entering the capital city in 2021. Parasto earned a university education and secured a good job with the Afghan government; after the fall of Kabul, she helped open schools for girls before she, too, was hounded into exile. Throughout, Rasmussen is a diligent, humane guide to the chaotic lives of ordinary citizens finding their way among the violence of extremism and war.
Sharp, memorable portraits of the myriad struggles of young people from Afghanistan.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780374609948
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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