Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4872 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

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.

Recommended read but not worthy of higher star rating
The book is a rather detached narration and at the end one feels the author needed to say more; an analysis of the people, their life, the wretchedness and an absolute destruction of the society. it seems that he is unaffected by what he sees!

The value of reading the book is a realization of the absolute devastation of the lives of the Afghans. A rich culture being driven to a primitive state where participants have become numb to their surroundings and life has little value. The book is undoubted peppered with a few good perspectives, such as the global media hype on the Bhuddah's destroyed by the Taliban (a sad affair in its own right) but pale compared to the numerous villages and people burnt and killed by them.

Premise seemed interesting
I borrowed this book from a friend, he explained a Scot crosses Afghanistan on foot shortly after 9/11/01. Seems like it would be action packed? Not quite, it must be hard to write a revealing travel journal about a people that aren't very revealing themselves. Although the Muslims do consider themselves first class in terms of hospitality towards travelers believe it or not.

Well, it's a welcome window on a world that we are educated on very little and as you read further you understand why so little is known. First, it is very hard to get to. Second, literacy and technology seem to be very sparce and thus info on this area does not travel far.

An interesting excerpt, one night Mr. Stewart is going to bed as villagers listen to a translated BBC transmission of Bill Gates explaining bundling Internet Explorer with Windows; these villagers marry their first cousins and do not use toilet paper they could not possibly have an idea what Mr. Gates is talking about.

You have to respect Rory's timing in all this, to him it is simply an opportunity to finish his epic trek. And after the reader finds out he can speak Persian fairly fluently that "danger element" an American reader might have intially presumed about his adventure seems to dissolve into a snapshot of conversations that seem perfectly logical.

Bottom line, it's worth your time. But perhaps a little reading up the modern history of Afghanistan wouldn't hurt. Stewart skims the political history in a way that I would have felt shorted if I hadn't read up on it elsewhere.