Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4302 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
We never really find out why Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan only a few months after the Taliban were deposed, but what emerges from the last leg of his two-year journey across Asia is a lesson in good travel writing. By turns harrowing and meditative, Stewart's trek through Afghanistan in the footsteps of the 15th-century emperor Babur is edifying at every step, grounded by his knowledge of local history, politics and dialects. His prose is lean and unsentimental: whether pushing through chest-high snow in the mountains of Hazarajat or through villages still under de facto Taliban control, his descriptions offer a cool assessment of a landscape and a people eviscerated by war, forgotten by time and isolated by geography. The well-oiled apparatus of his writing mimics a dispassionate camera shutter in its precision. But if we are to accompany someone on such a highly personal quest, we want to know who that person is. Unfortunately, Stewart shares little emotional background; the writer's identity is discerned best by inference. Sometimes we get the sense he cares more for preserving history than for the people who live in it (and for whom historical knowledge would be luxury). But remembering Geraldo Rivera's gunslinging escapades, perhaps we could use less sap and more clarity about this troubled and fascinating country.(May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
In 2002, in the midst of war and a typically harsh winter, Rory Stewart embarked on the seemingly insane undertaking of walking across Afghanistan. That it was madness was explained to the accomplished Scots journalist, but he was not to be dissuaded, especially since the journey was part of the larger scheme that he had already accomplished: to traverse the Muslim world on foot by way of Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Thankfully, he lived, and nearly as marvelous a reason for celebration is the book that resulted, a glowing achievement in the rich history of travel writing. Stewart's narration of his own work further reveals a traveler of deep insight and humility (without a trace of sentimentality), and a man of rare courage and grace. M.O. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Stewart, a resident of Scotland, has written for the New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books, and he is a former fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In January 2002, having just spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart began a walk across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. Although the Taliban had been ousted several weeks earlier, Stewart was launching a journey through a devastated, unsettled, and unsafe landscape. The recounting of that journey makes for an engrossing, surprising, and often deeply moving portrait of the land and the peoples who inhabit it. Stewart relates his encounters with ordinary villagers, security officials, students, displaced Taliban officials, foreign-aid workers, and rural strongmen, and his descriptions of the views and attitudes of those he lived with are presented in frank, unvarnished terms. Nation building in Afghanistan remains a work in progress, and this work should help those who wish to understand the complexities of that task. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Rory, Babur and Babur
I understand and concur to a qualified extent with some of the less than glowing reviews here. Yes, the prose is sparse. Yes, our author doesn't seem to talk very much about himself. Yes, Tom Bissell's review in the NYT is ridiculously encomiastic...."a novelist's sense of character"...??? I wonder what particular novelist Mr. Bissell had in mind. But to counter these criticisms, I would offer two pointed rejoinders.

1) Stewart makes clear that the Emperor Babur's account is the model for his own. Indeed, passages from Babur make up a great part of the book. Readers seemed to have skimmed the passage on p.11 of my copy about Babur:

"At times it seems the only thing missing from the story is himself. He never explains what drives him to live this extraordinary life and take these kinds of risks. He does not describe his emotions, and as a result can seem distant and the episodes of his life, repetitive. Confronted by dead bodies or people trying to kill him, he writes in increasingly dispassionate and impersonal prose. But this restraint only emphasizes the extraordinary nature of his experiences."

Rory has followed Babur's formula to the letter.

2) I can not help but notice how much a sort of class envy hangs over these critical reviews: "bratty", "Eton boy", "super privileged" are just some of the adjectives applied to Mr. Stewart. I would submit to these reviewers that they come across as more than a little ill-natured and absurd. If you have taken the sorts of risks with your life as Rory does here, if you have suffered from dysentery and managed to keep walking through sub-zero weather day upon day, then let fly with the slings and arrows of your resentment. If not, pray don't expose yourself as an armchair yob with a twelve tonne chip on your shoulder.

I don't myself know why Rory took this journey. He doesn't seem to know either. I don't know why he adopted a dog whose teeth had been knocked out by villagers to accompany him, naming him Babur after the emperor. It may well be that he's completely mad. If so, we could do with a little more madness in the world. The book and its author have their flaws, but a lack of intrepidity or kindness, to animals and men, are not among them. Good job, Rory. I'm glad you made it through.

Somewhere in Afghanistan, the Point Got Lost
It's an odd sensation in a travel book to be guided by a traveler who remains, for 300 pages, a cipher. Stewart reveals virtually nothing about himself or about his motive for undertaking his dangerous, difficult, and (evidently) unrewarding journey--on foot, no less. In fact, there's something distinctly bratty about Stewart's approach to the whole endeavor: he made the trip because he "wanted to," he repeats, and one can almost hear him stamping his foot; his evident lack of any need to support himself for years at a time (he has bundles of cash at his disposal and, at the end of the journey to Afghanistan, returns to "his room" in his parents' house in Scotland) and his conviction that he should be fed and housed by strangers all the way across Afghanistan (but not accompanied or told where to go) have a distinctly elitist and slightly juvenile ring to them, which is not completely surprising given Stewart's parentage and social status (read his Wikipedia biography to get a hint of the manor to which he was born). The people that he meets, meanwhile, are with few exceptions entirely dreadful--dull when they are not outright dangerous, rude when they are not simply miserable, malicious and sadistic when they are not merely indifferent. Nor are the villages he visits anything to write home about, each one essentially identical to another in its revolting, raw-sewage-and-war-debris sameness. The landscape--which Stewart frequently cannot see because he is walking through blinding snowstorms--gets even shorter shrift, and Stewart only occasionally remembers to describe the quality of light at sunset or the shape of a mountain range. Indeed, one gathers that all of that was wholly secondary; his goal was the destination (Kabul), never the journey. (And that's perhaps no surprise, given how ghastly Afghanistan appears in Stewart's version.) The inclusion, meanwhile, of the numerous grade-school-quality sketches that Stewart inked into his journal is a blunder that undermines what little seriousness the book can lay claim to. Stewart hints occasionally that he's bedeviled by unhappy memories or regrets as he walks, but that's as close as he lets anyone come to a glimpse of what's taking place inside his head or of what his reactions are to most of the things that happen to him. That's a fatal flaw in a book that has so little else to offer the reader. If the Afghans are essentially unknowable and alien, if the places are unremarkable and monotonous, and if the narrator slowly disappear as he writes, the whole edifice of the project crumbles. Stewart's only tears in the book are for an animal and never for the human misery he traipses through, as much proof as anyone should surely need that he is (or was) a callow, overprivileged youth on walkabout and that _The Places In Between_ got published through high-society connections and not because Stewart had anything particularly meaningful to say. In a country as barren and forbidding as Afghanistan, the places in between are largely voids, and it is a void that Stewart's book most faithfully transmits.

Uninformative
Afghanistan is a country that I wanted to understand better. This book did not help in that regard. Yes, it was an easy read, but I did not learn much about that part of the country. The writer never explained sources of income, sources of food, opportunities or hopes. In the end I felt that I read a book about a man who is taking a stupid journey, and I wasted my time reading about a senseless venture. Why take a walk through central Afghanistan in the middle of the winter with no real reason or support, a few weeks after the fall of the Taliban? Serves him right to freeze, get dysentery and in general have a miserable trip.

If he was on a CIA mission, then it would have been helpful to let us know what he was looking for and how he was going to find the requested information. As is was, it simply seemed a senseless walk.