A great book for Foreign Service kids...

Three Little Kids and the State Department, an illustrated children's book by Foreign Service spouse Elaine Guihan, tells the story of her three boys growing up in a Foreign Service family, told from the children's perspective.   Perfect for eight to thirteen-year-olds it covers some of the problems and joys that children experience moving from post to post and culture to culture.  This book will give children a preview of what they might experience over the years.  Here are excerpts from the description in the November, 2008 issue of "Foreign Service Journal":

"Alex, Colin and Jim's dad is an FSO.  At an early age, they leave home with their parents and live in Mauritania, France, Cote d'Ivoire and Turkey with a surprising interlude in Washington, D.C.  Their life is not always easy but it's never dull.  Plunked down in the Sahara, the boys play in the desert, learn how to wear a headscarf and drink camel's milk.  After two years, they pack their suitcases and move to France, an amazingly beautiful place.  There they visit historic castles and roller skate at the Place de la Concorde.  More adventures follow in Turkey and Cote d'Ivoire.  Written in a light, wry tone the book is colorfully illustrated."  

The book is available on Amazon.com or Xlibris.com. 

The Sewing Circles of Herat by Christina Lamb

Christina Lamb does an excellent job explaining the history of Afghanistan while giving the readers a chance to understand the beauty of the country and its people.  

Imagine a time when women cannot wear lipstick, go out in public, wear white shoes or shoes that click.  Women cannot laugh out loud or be seen from the window not even their silhouette.   A time when not even parks can be named for women, when no music is allowed and the only entertainment is public amputations and executions.  This according to Ms. Lamb is life under Taliban rule. 

In Herat, once the centre of Persian culture ruled by a powerful queen, the oppression of culture and women is the worst.   It was in the city of Herat that Christina Lamb came across the Golden Needle Ladies Sewing Circle.  This group of heroic women was teaching something the Taliban approved of, sewing.  But in between stitches the ladies are teaching something very much forbidden; they are teaching literature to the women of Afghanistan. 

Book Lust to Go

Looking for an unusual book about a particular area? This is the book for you. This book "Book Lust to Go" does a good job of listing areas of the world, topics and books about them. Everything is easy to find and there are both fiction and nonfiction titles listed. This is one book of a series and I would recommend them all. I think the author Nancy Pearl has done a great job assembling interesting books about interesting areas. This is a great book to buy or check out so you can plan your next 10 years of reading. The cover says "Recommended reading for travelers, vagabonds, and dreamers."

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

This book has received mixed reviews, however I believe everyone that enjoyed reading The Poisonwood Bible will enjoy this novel.  Born in the United States but raised in variety of homes in Mexico, the protagonist Harrison Shepherd finds himself divided between the two nations.

The first half of the book takes place in Mexico and will provide you with just enough Mexican history to make you want to research more.  Kingsolver does an excellent job describing the colorful towns and lush tropics of Mexico.  She weaves the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, painter Frida Kahlo, with their contentious friend Leon Trotsky into flamboyant stories that come to life.  The story spans three decades, two continents and is written as a collection of memoirs, diary entries, letters and articles.

This is Kingsolver’s sixth novel; it won the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and Library of Virginia Literary Award.  It has been nine years since her last novel.

A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

When the British Empire left Pakistan in 1947 it did so by dividing the country of Pakistan in two.  

East Pakistan spoke mostly Bengali, West Pakistan spoke Urdu, with different religions and cultures the two sides were as Anam says “poised on either side of India like a pair of horns”.  As the novel opens we learn the protagonist, recently widowed Rehana, has lost custody of her children to her deceased husband’s brother.  The children are forced to live in Lahore until Rehana is able to go to court and win them back.  Hardworking Rehana then struggles to build a small house which she then rents to a Hindu family.  Life goes on as normal until the revolution begins in Dhaka.  In the middle of all the chaos with family and friends, Rehana dreams a simple wish: that “the country would go on being her home, and the children would go on being her children. In no time at all the world would right itself, and they would go on living ordinary, unexceptional lives.”

I really enjoyed reading this book; it is well written and does an excellent job illustrating the problems of the region.

 

New Hot Book

West of Kabul, East of New York

by Tamim Ansary

I liked this book.  It is an interesting memoir of someone growing up in Afghanistan with an American mother and Afghan father.  Tamim Ansary does an excellent job explaining what life was like in Afghanistan in the 60's.  I think you will enjoy his descriptions of the close knit families and what it was like growing up half-American in a culture permeated with tribal connections and high walls.  This is a good book to learn something about the culture and the customs of Aghanistan.   I think he gets a little "long-winded" sometimes in his descriptions but I still enjoyed the book. 

Opium Season by Joel Hafvenstein

According to Hafvenstein there is an Afghan proverb that says, “Mountains can never reach each other despite their bigness, but humans can”. This book “Opium Season” will reach you. All 300 plus pages are well written and full of description and history of Afghanistan and its people.
The author, Joel Hafvenstein writes with honesty about his experiences as a contractor with U.S. AID in Helmand. He weaves in a history of the region while describing modern day culture. He covers a little bit of everything from romance to marriage to children to a sometimes painful description of his daily diet.
I think this book is a great way to learn something about the history and culture of Afghanistan.   If you are in Afghanistan, on the way or just like good books, this book is well worth reading.
Have you read it?   What did you think about this book? 

Good read 4 Afghanistan...

An Unexpected Light by Jason Elliot

Book review by Mikkela Thompson



Fresh out of school at the age of 19, Jason Elliot embarks on the adventure he dreamed of as a boy. An Unexpected Light is already considered a classic travelogue about Afghanistan. It covers a decade of Jason Elliots travels in Afghanistan starting with his first summer vacation adventure in the mid-1980s. As Jason says in his introduction, I had in mind a quietly epic sort of journey, the kind you no longer hear of much; no tailored expedition, but a route guided by events themselves. In An Unexpected Light, he takes us, as he discusses with the Ambassador of Afghanistan, to where “another red line wound westwards towards the megalithic Buddhas of Bamiyan, the turquoise lakes of Band-i Amir, the lonely minaret of Jam and the springs and shrines of Chest-i Sharif; a manageable route by jeep, if the roads were not blocked by snow.”



Certain places saturate the emotions. Afghanistan is just such a place. The omnipresence of the brackets of life survival and death, ignite the writers mind. Young Jason describes the land of Afghanistan with painterly dexterity. His writing diverts into the flowery at times but he intersperses the jacquard tapestry of his adjectives with verbatim conversations. He meets many Afghans but most of the telling conversations are with the journalists, diplomats, relief workers and other travelers he meets. One night, returning after curfew from an embassy party, he writes, “I skirted another checkpoint. What if some Taleb on a rooftop saw me skulking along the road and began to shoot?” Though the landscape and history of Afghanistan are intricately described, Jason Elliot hints only occasionally at his inner landscape. This detachment makes An Unexpected Light an insightful outsider’s view of Afghanistan.



A textbook purely of historical facts might bore some readers. Page after page of anecdotes about cockroaches might repel other readers. In An Unexpected Light, I found the harsh realities of Afghanistan easier to read about because of Mr. Elliots insulating literary flights of hyperbole: “We came down, as a ghost sinks through a wall, beneath a canopy of sculpted cloud, and circled the magnificent cradle of mountains surrounding the Shomali plain in the absinthine light of the setting sun.”


I thought it a worthwhile read, from the safety of my armchair.


***thanks to Mikkela for this excellent review!  If you would like to have your book review or comment appear on this blog please write us at floaskut@state.gov or just post it as a comment.....What do you think was this a good book? 

See Spot run. Run Spot run.

 What do you think of the shift from the printed page to digital?
                    Want to read more about it?
Check out this site http://www.futureofthebook.org/  


The printed page is giving way to the networked screen. The Institute for the Future of the Book seeks to chronicle this shift, and impact its development in a positive direction. The Institute is a project of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

One major consequence of the shift to digital is the addition of graphical, audio, and video elements to the written word. More profound, however, is the book's reinvention in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress.


As such, the Institute is deeply concerned with the surrounding forces that will shape the network environment and the conditions of culture: network neutrality, copyright and privacy. We believe that a free, neutral network, a progressive intellectual property system, and robust safeguards for privacy are essential conditions for an enlightened digital age.
*taken from The Future of the Book website

Honeynut, no sugar, multigrain...?

We have another guest poster who wanted to share his book review with the UT community after seeing that we also have a Decision Tree guide to help families decide where to reside during a UT.  So, take it away, Charles:

"Jonah Lehrer has a new book, ‘How we Decide” and he offers us non-neuroscientists a glimpse into the neuroscience, psychological and emotion behind decision making. He shows us that there is no art to decision making. I wanted to know how the brain works, but I also wanted to confirm my theory that I make better decisions than my 20 year old.

Mr. Lehrer wrote his book because he would easily become paralyzed even when trying to make a simple decision like, what kind of cheerios does my wife like…. with honey, no sugar, what if she doesn’t like it, etc….20 minutes later he is still in the aisle at Giant’s mumbling, which one should I buy, I like Cheerios?

Sometimes too much information is a really bad thing when it comes to making a decision, and that's part of the predicament we often find ourselves in. When I read 12 post reports, then we have to submit a bid list and I really just want to go play basketball, (but I can’t say that because she’s wanting me to be serious) what do I do? When you have all these different brands, options, details and choices, I become a little shaky too. This book resonated with own my personal career decisions, I can’t explain why I chose this over that. “How did you know to do that”, reply, “because I just knew it was the right answer.” I was impressed by the way Mr. Lehrer explained how emotions affect physiological changes, and how research has shown that people under stress will still make great decisions.

This is a good read for the young and old. Jonah is a good story teller and he mixes just the right amount of research, economics, science and humor to make it worth the time to read it. Also try his first book “Proust was a Neuroscientist”."

The Last of the Angels

The novel is set in Kirkuk during the 1950's and is a humorous story of three very different people - Hameed Nylon, Khidir Musafrom, and Burhan Abdullah - all from the same neighborhood in Kirkuk.  Using humor and the supernatural, the author shows us the mix of people - Turkmen, Kurds, Arabs, Jews, and Assyrian Christians - that all made up Kirkuk in the 50s.  The author states, "I'd like my readers first of all to read this novel as a literary work.  The Last of the Angels is a journey inside Arabic and Islamic culture, mythology, and religion not only as it exists in Iraq, but also in the entire Middle East."
Don't expect this novel to stay humorous because at the end all the characters reveal the dangerous world in which they live.

The author of this book, Fadhil al-Azzawi was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1940.  He has a PhD in Cultural Journalism and has written several books and poetry collections.  At present he resides in Germany.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif

From Sherri - This novel is based on the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed the Pakistan leader General Zia ul-Haq.  It is a witty, illuminating, and entertaining novel that does a pretty good job of covering the Americans in Pakistan, Soviets in Afghanistan, and everyone who's out to make some "fast" money.  In this fictitious story, we learn that General Zia begins every day reading his horoscope and asking, "Who is out to kill me today?"  If you read Joseph Heller's book Catch 22 and enjoyed the twisted, dark, sometimes risky humor, then you should enjoy A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The author graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy and currently lives in London where he heads the BBC Urdu news service.  This is his first novel.

What are you reading?

Another Round of Book Club

The Storyteller's Daughter, by Saira Shah

From Sherri - "You might recognize Saira Shah's name because her film, Beneath the Veil, aired on CNN a few years ago.  The film did a superb job illuminating the difficulties women have when living under the Taliban rule.  In this book, Shah returns to Afghanistan to learn more about the myths and stories she grew up with.  Her father, we learn, is a Sufi and a storyteller who filled his family with a love for the country of Afghanistan and its people.  This is a very readable book and should be enjoyed by all.  Thanks to one of our UT family members for suggesting it - I really enjoyed it!"

From Bridget - "I actually just started to read this book (thanks, Sherri, for passing on your copy to me) and although I'm not very far along, I'd love to hear what others who are reading or have read this book have to say.  Comment below - just please don't tell me the ending!"

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi

This is an excellent book that manages to portray powerful emotions.  Don't be fooled by its size - it might be a small book but it has a large story to tell.  The story takes place during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.  It is a story of war, family, tradition, and home.  The main characters are an old man and his grandson who, when the book starts, are waiting for a ride.  What are they waiting for? Why are they waiting?  As Rahimi answers these questions, we learn something about generations of Afghan history and traditions.  It's well worth reading and you may want to watch the movie too!

The Nightingale by Morgana Gallaway

Set in modern Mosul, Iraq, this book offers a glimpse into the challenges of everyday life and the changes war brings to a family. Leila al-Ghani and her family lived very will during the regime of Saddam Hussein, but when Hussein’s regime is toppled, Leila’s once-modern family begins to shift towards conservatism. Leila finds she is living in a very dangerous city which may hinder her goal of becoming a doctor.

Stones into Schools by Gregg Mortenson

The latest book by Mortenson picks up where "Three Cups of Tea" left off in 2003.  Recently released on December 1, it describes Mortenson's relentless efforts to establish schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This book talks of the massive earthquake that struck the region in 2005, Mortenson’s armed abduction by the Taliban, and describes his unique approach to build relationships with Islamic clerics, military leaders, and tribal leaders alike. By using beautiful, rich, personal stories, Mortenson has the ability to make us a part of his vision of peace for the region. This book differs from "Three Cups of Tea" in that the author opens up more to reveal his views and vision on Islam, women, peace, and military matters. If you haven't read "Three Cups of Tea" please take the time to read it and then be sure to read "Stones into Schools".