Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace
Recommendation from my friend and former writing teacher Patricia Lee Lewis:
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan is Ann Jones's trenchant report from the city where she spent the last four winters working in humanitarian aid. Helping impoverished war widows, training Kabul's ill-equipped English teachers, and investigating the city's prisons for women, Jones encounters women and men from every layer of Afghan society. She unravels Afghanistan's complicated history as a proxy battlefield for greater powers and confronts the ways in which Afghan politics, education, and culture have repeatedly been hijacked-by Communists, Islamist extremists, and Western free marketers-always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S. promises and performance, between the new "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between wha''s boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends upon our own.
For more information, go to www.annjonesonline.com
And a nice article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about E. Ethelbert Miller and Langston Hughes.
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan is Ann Jones's trenchant report from the city where she spent the last four winters working in humanitarian aid. Helping impoverished war widows, training Kabul's ill-equipped English teachers, and investigating the city's prisons for women, Jones encounters women and men from every layer of Afghan society. She unravels Afghanistan's complicated history as a proxy battlefield for greater powers and confronts the ways in which Afghan politics, education, and culture have repeatedly been hijacked-by Communists, Islamist extremists, and Western free marketers-always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S. promises and performance, between the new "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between wha''s boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends upon our own.
For more information, go to www.annjonesonline.com
And a nice article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about E. Ethelbert Miller and Langston Hughes.
