Journal Entry 1 by Ri from Cincinnati, Ohio USA on Monday, July 12, 2010

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. 

Journal Entry 2 by Ri at Cincinnati, Ohio USA on Saturday, February 05, 2011

So this book made it clear to me that I knew little of Afghanistan with any real understanding. I had read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, but I still didn't have a clear picture of all the various ethnic groups and struggles that have taken place during the past 30+ years. This book was beautiful and horrid and confusing all at the same time. It was hard for me to keep track of all the places and people, but that just added to my understanding of the chaos that has ensued there. What I particularly liked about this book is that ultimately, it was the author's quest to discover a beautiful and perhaps mythical Afghanistan that few of us in the West are familiar with at all. I was glad to be privy to this view. 

Journal Entry 3 by candy-is-dandy at Braintree, Essex United Kingdom on Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Received safely. Thanks, Ri. I find this sort of book fascinating.