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The Bookseller of Kabul

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Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
List Price: $13.99
Our Price: $5.00
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Average Ratings:

This mesmerizing portrait of a proud man who, through three decades and successive repressive regimes, heroically braved persecution to bring books to the people of Kabul has elicited extraordinary praise throughout the world and become a phenomenal international bestseller. The Bookseller of Kabul is startling in its intimacy and its details - a revelation of the plight of Afghan women and a window into the surprising realities of daily life in today's Afghanistan.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 958.10922
EAN: 9780316159418
ISBN: 0316159417
Label: Back Bay Books
Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2004-10-26
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Studio: Back Bay Books


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
• A Thousand Splendid Suns
• Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil
• The Kite Runner


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: Humanity beneath the burkha
Comment: I read this book over a year ago. One of my accidental reads. I got it to pass on to another but after flicking through a few pages I was held captive. The author in a most humane way exposes the humanity of the Afghan people that the Taliban sought to erase with their medieval edicts. By living with the Khan family, observing their daily goings on and life and so vividly relating her experience and observations, Asne brings in the reader to walk the walk with her in the battered streets of Kabul. Book lovers will love Sultan Khan for his devotion to books, but will not appreiciate his ungracious act of suing the author for painting an honest picture in which he sometimes appeared in unflattering poses. My favourite character remains Bibi Gul - just by her name and nature. I supposed he must have seen the chance of a quick buck or two.

Great book. Simply brilliant. Highly recommended to those curious about or interested in the plight and life of the Afghani people. Without saying so explicitly, the book means well and wishes the ordinary people of Afghanistan, especially the women, well as I so desperately do.

Chukwudum Ikeazor

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Comment: This is an interesting read. I found it not only enjoyable but informative about issues in middle east culture. I don't think that saying it shows the problems with Islam is accurate. Rather, the culture in that region of the world is sexist and stunts the ability of these nations to prosper intellecutally and economically.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Insightful look into Afghan culture
Comment: The Bookseller of Kabul truly gives a representation of an Afghan family, shortly after 9/11. The book provides information that may never have been glimpsed had the author not lived with the family. Truly an intriguing, sad, shocking, emotional book. I highly recommend it.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Insightful and Compelling
Comment: I read this book early into my year as an American military advisor in Afghanistan. I found that the picutre of Afghan family life that it painted was very helpful in understanding the lives of the Afghans I dealt with every day. Because of the insight, I felt better able to communicate and build rapport with my Afghan friends. The book discusses frankly the disadvantages of women in a cultural context. If the Global War on Terror is a campaign to win hearts and minds, then this book is a must read in order to understand the hearts and minds of the people on the front lines.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Honest and candid account
Comment: Asne Seirstadt writes an honest and candid account of her four months of life with an Afghan family, following the fall of the Taliban and the end of the reign of terror they subjected the Afghan people to.

She spent these months with the family of Sultan Khan who- for twenty years-defied the tyranny of the Communists and then the Taliban by selling books on the black market because the tyrants did not allow books except those which subscribed to their narrow minded and sick ideas.

Afghanistan was a great, progressive and vibrant country during the reign of King Zahir Shah who was overthrown by Mohammed Daoud Khan in 1973 after which followed 5 years of instability and then the sheer hell of Communist repression followed shortly thereafter by the Taliban's reign of terror.

During the 70s already underdressed women risked being shot in the legs or having acid sprayed in their faces by the fundamentalists.
After the civil war broke out more and more women had to cover up. After the Taliban seized power all female faces disappeared from the streets of Kabul.

My heart really hurts for these women and girls who suffered so under the Islamists and had to be hidden away and obey through fear.
And I point an accusing finger at all those leftists who claim to believe in feminism but defend excesses Should women in these countries got less rights than what you people take for granted?

Even after the Taliban were overthrown women and girls feared going out alone or dressing as they pleased, because of the residue of terror that the Taliban had left behind.

During the Taliban era one of the most hated buildings in Kabul was the "Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Extermination of Sin". Here women who had walked unescorted by a male relative, or who wore makeup under their burkas, and men who cut their beards, languished under torture and many died.
Before that these had once bee the headquarters of the equally brutal Soviets.
No wonder Leftists and Islamo-Fascists love each other so much. They both have the mania for cruelty and destruction and the death impulse.



Asne Seirstadt witnessed the destruction and death left behind by the Taliban.
The Taliban engaged in ethnic cleansing of the Tajiks and other minorities in northern Afghanistan, raising entire villages to the ground and poisoning water wells and blowing water pipes and dams (vital for survival in these dry plains) before they withdrew.

Seirstadt masterfully covers the sights, sounds and smells of Afghanistan from the cramped life in people's houses where extended families lived together to the bazaars and the 'hamman', the massive communal bath, where thousands of women cleaned themselves and their children on certain days of the week.

Seirstadt captures much of Afghanistan's history and life and culture in these pages.
It is an excellent book for those who want to learn about this country.

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