The Bookseller of Kabul
Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Åsne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months. For more than twenty years Sultan Khan defied the authorities - be they communist or...
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Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Åsne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months. For more than twenty years Sultan Khan defied the authorities - be they communist or Taliban - to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the communists and watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He even resorted to hiding most of his stock in attics all over Kabul.But while Khan is passionate in his love of books and hatred of censorship, he is also a committed Muslim with strict views on family life. As an outsider, Seierstad is able to move between the private world of the women - including Khan's two wives - and the more public lives of the men. And so we learn of proposals and marriages, suppression and abuse of power, crime and punishment. The result is a gripping and moving portrait of a family, and a clear-eyed assessment of a country struggling to free itself from history.
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Format: kindle
ASIN: B002TXZT3E
Category:
Non Fiction,
Travel,
Autobiography,
Memoir,
Biography,
Writing,
History,
Cultural,
Book Club,
Books About Books,
Religion,
Asia,
Biography Memoir,
Islam
What I liked about this book was that it observed and refrained from judging, as much as that is ever possible. We get various angles on the same person, in relation to different family members, which makes for a contradictory but truthful and rich picture. These are real people, not fictional chara...
This book had me torn, it reads more like fiction than fact, chopped and changed between characters and depressed the hell out of me about the treatment of women and their own apparent connivence with it. The mindless acceptance of the treatment they got was heartbreaking, the assumptions of the men...
This book is nothing what I thought it would be. I read the flap and assumed it was going to be the author's recollection of her experience with the Khan family while she found solace in their house. Instead, Åsne Seierstad writes entirely as a third person, excluding herself from the story of wha...
A truly enlightening read. While I knew that the treatment of women in Afghanistan was horrendous and oftentimes inhumane, this inside look at a 'real family' was an eye-opener. What is most distressing, I think, is that the patriarch of the family is a somewhat progressive man by Afghani standards,...
I think that this book was what I was looking for when I read Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil. This seems to be more behind the veil than that one. I can understand how people could have problems with Seierstad's style, and she is being sued by the family in the book. ...