Suggested Reading: The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

[Paper Roses]

http://www.amazon.com/Places-Between-Rory-Stewart/dp/0156031566

On Amazon.com, a used copy is very inexpensive. I was riveted to the couch, amazed at the courage of this young man. It is an entirely different world. I have passed the book around to friends and all said it gave them a vivid picture of life in this ancient, poor but fascinating country.
I also read a book recently about a man who walked across China, toward the west. Within the route, he crossed Pakistan and Afghanistan too. I cannot think of either the title or Author. The main thing I do remember is the author's remarks about the way of life and mind set in that area. Both helped me understand a bit more about the region.




Review posted on Amazon:

This is a great book to gain insight into the mind and history of the people of Afghanistan.
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

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. He is an interesting person; he went on to be deputy governor of an Iraqi province, and Tory MP

Among the ranks of all the new ­parliamentary candidates on offer, from all parties, Stewart is blessed – or cursed – by standing out as being by a long way the most extraordinary. Neither quirky candour, nor unconcealed intelligence, nor being famous already, have proved reliable foundations for a Westminster career, and he knows this. As we walk, the New Yorker magazine emails asking him to agree to a profile piece. Newspaper cuttings pile on the ­accolades: the author of two bestselling books, picked by Esquire magazine as one of the 75 most influential people of the century. In quick succession, he was a former officer in the Black Watch and a diplomat in Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo war.

After leaving the Foreign Office in search of new adventures, Stewart, who looks (deceptively) winsome and vulnerable with his tousled hair and wiry build, walked 6,000 miles across Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, mostly alone (his winter walk across Afghanistan was the subject of his first book). Then, in the chaos that followed invasion, he was asked to serve as deputy governor of an Iraqi province (the subject of his second book). He founded and still funds an Afghan cultural charity, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, reviving ­traditional crafts to restore the wrecked old centre of Kabul, and ran it for ­several years, outside the expat ­security bubble.

An observer could be forgiven for wondering whether Stewart has ­entered some kind of unconscious competition for the most astonishing obituary of his generation. Perhaps he was a spy for a time, as some say. But this isn't a career that needs any added exoticism. In his 20s he was Britain's presence on the ground in Montenegro; in his early 30s he was besieged in the governor's offices in Iraq's Maysan province. He was, briefly, summer ­tutor to Princes William and Harry; he writes columns for the New York ­Review of Books; last year he became a professor of human rights at Harvard and he is still only just 37. The romantic American ideal of a British adventurer, he has testified before the Senate foreign relations committee and briefed the Obama administration and Gordon Brown; Brad Pitt apparently bought the film rights to his life. He has just made a series on Lawrence of Arabia for the BBC. And now – surprised by his own headstrong change of direction – Stewart is giving it up to join a House of Commons whose ­reputation has been trashed by the ­expenses scandal.

"People do think I am a bit mad to do it," he says as we sit in the friendly bar of Kirkby Stephen's Black Bull ­hotel, in the middle of the rural ­constituency, which has been Con­servative for the last 90 years. "They can't quite understand why somebody like me would like to be a politician." He only joined the party this summer, responding to David Cameron's call for people with outside experience to come forward, and was chosen for Penrith in an open primary, his second attempt to win selection to a seat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/14/rory-stewart-tory-mp-penrith

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. I have it, have not read it yet.

Good reminder for me to dig it out tonight.