| 12/10/08 07:40 PM |
#1533
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Michael Theut
Nicole and anyone else interested,
I was sick of the soundbites re: Afghanistan so... I bought a book called "The Places in Between". It's a quick read and one of my favorite books. It's about a guy who walks across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban. It's not political and somewhat uplifting. Pick it up sometime. I bet Chris G. would get a kick out of it as well.
Here's a review:
Rory Stewart, a resident of Scotland, has written for the New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books, and he is a former fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In January 2002, having just spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart began a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. Although the Taliban had been ousted several weeks earlier, Stewart was launching a journey through a devastated, unsettled, and unsafe landscape. The recounting of that journey makes for an engrossing, surprising, and often deeply moving portrait of the land and the peoples who inhabit it. Stewart relates his encounters with ordinary villagers, security officials, students, displaced Taliban officials, foreign-aid workers, and rural strongmen, and his descriptions of the views and attitudes of those he lived with are presented in frank, unvarnished terms. Nation building in Afghanistan remains a work in progress, and this work should help those who wish to understand the complexities of that task.
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