Book Review: West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story

West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story on amazon.com

Reader Rating = ********** (8.5/10)

Date: October 29, 2004 4:34:34 PM GMT+04:00

Salaams! Finished reading West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (Tamim Ansary) just before leaving for the RLT Mtg. This was an excellent read by a very insightful and competent writer; a master of prose pictures that "take you there." I recommend it heartily--I give it a 8.5/10 rating. I thought the first half of the book, as he remembers his first 16 years growing up in Afg, were classic; lots of very interesting insights regarding family/community life. His trip through parts of the Mslm world later as a young adult was also interesting--and he makes some very interesting comments regarding Islm and especially the fundamentalists.

Check out some of the reviews/comments below.

All for now--wes

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A passionate personal journey through two cultures in conflict.

Shortly after militant Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Tamim Ansary of San Francisco sent an e-mail to twenty friends, telling how the threatened U.S. reprisals against Afghanistan looked to him as an Afghan American. The message spread, and in a few days it had reached, and affected, millions of people-Afghans and Americans, soldiers and pacifists, conservative Christians and talk-show hosts; for the message, written in twenty minutes, was one Ansary had been writing all his life.

West of Kabul, East of New York is an urgent communiqué by an American with "an Afghan soul still inside me," who has lived in the very different worlds of Islam and the secular West. The son of an Afghan man and the first American woman to live as an Afghan, Ansary grew up in the intimate world of Afghan family life, one never seen by outsiders. No sooner had he emigrated to San Francisco than he was drawn into the community of Afghan expatriates sustained by the dream of returning to their country -and then drawn back to the Islamic world himself to discover the nascent phenomenon of militant religious fundamentalism.

Tamim Ansary has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices on the conflict between Islam and the West. His book is a deeply personal account of the struggle to reconcile two great civilizations and to find some point in the imagination where they might meet.
 
…a raw and poignant book…that captures a lost era, and one man’s decades-long mourning of it…
John Freeman, Christian Science Monitor

(Ansary) delivered us from text into context, from crisis into history, from isolation into geography, from a world shattered to one that, having lived through millennia of shatterings, stays mournfully round, and around. …
Richard Eder, New York Times

West of Kabul, East of New York is one of those rare pieces of journalism--Rebecca West’s dispatches from Nuremberg come to mind, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima—that don’t just record history but make it.
Roger Downey, Seattle Weekly

West of Kabul, East of New … belongs to the broader library in which are considered the big questions about the price of progress in this perhaps too modern world.
John Nichols, Capital Times

more press

West of Kabul, East of New York has been included in the following lists:
• Favorite Books of the 2002 by Amazon.com
• Best Books of 2002 by Christian Science Monitor
• Best Adult Books for High School Students, by The School Library Journal
• Recommended picks for the week of April 4, 2003 by the New York Times
• Favorite Book Picks for 2002 by Written Voices (Online Book Review)
• Recommended Readings Archives Queens Borough Public Library
• Best Books of the Year by the San Jose Mercury
 
Online reviews and/or conversations with Tamim can be found at
DesiJournal
Washington Post.com
Pat Holt’s Uncensored
Book Loons
Book Review Café (http://www.bookreviewcafe.com/westofkabul.html)

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Any carping about this being an instant book should be quelled when readers actually encounter Ansary's considered prose prose he himself contrasts to the e-mailed commentary he fired off on September 12 that found its way to millions of readers around the world (including FSG editorial). The e-mail, printed here in an appendix, included such comments as "When you think `Taliban,' think `Nazis.' When you think `Bin Laden,' think `Hitler.' And when you think `the people of Afghanistan,' think `the Jews in the concentration camps.' " Ansary, the son of a Pashtun Afghan father and Finnish-American mother, lived as a Muslim outside of Kabul until the early '60s, when he left on scholarship to attend an American high school, eventually going on to college and becoming an educational writer ("if you have children, they have probably read or used some product I have edited or written") with a family of his own in San Francisco. This book chronicles, with calm insight and honesty, Ansary's feelings at all points: his childhood spent within his "clan" ("our group self was just as real as our individual selves, perhaps more so"), a narrative of his often fascinating 1980 trip ("Looking for Islam") throughout the Muslim world that makes up the bulk of the book, and dissections of the differing paths taken by his sister, brother and himself. While Ansary's political insights can be detached or perhaps purposefully aloof his descriptions of having lived in and identified alternately with the West and the Islamic world are utterly compelling. --