An exceedingly, commendably unique eyewitness account of a country in transition, told by a charming young narrator.
What did you do over summer vacation? Akbar spent his—actually three of them—in Kunar, Afghanistan, with his father, a repatriated Afghan who happened to be tight with President Hamid Karzai.
The 20-year-old author first told his story on NPR’s This American Life—and quite an American life it’s been. Akbar grew up in California, where his father sold hip-hop–style clothing. Following 9/11 and the subsequent dismantling of the Taliban, Akbar’s father, who had left Afghanistan for Pakistan and ultimately America after the Soviet invasion of 1979, went straight home, where he became Karzai’s spokesman and, soon after, governor of the rural province Kunar. Akbar, then a high-school senior, took his exams early and skipped the prom so that he could join his father as soon as possible. Although he’d never traveled to Afghanistan before, he felt an immediate attachment to the country. On his first trip, he brought along his beloved collection of U2 CDs, and, for his father, dress socks, Krazy Glue and Tylenol PM, rarities in Kabul. Akbar attended a traditional wedding celebration; listened in on some of his father’s political meetings; dealt with suspicious security guards upon arrival from the U.S.; discussed ’80s music with American soldiers; learned to shoot; was falsely accused of smuggling gems; ogled famous Afghan writers; and visited, as a “tourist,” Osama bin Laden’s house. Refreshingly, what Akbar did not do was feel—or at least demonstrate here—much angst over what could have been conflicting identities. With the help of Harper’s editor Burton, Akbar achieves a level of artistry that co-authored works rarely even approach.
An exceedingly, commendably unique eyewitness account of a country in transition, told by a charming young narrator.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-520-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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 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
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