Right, so I don't necessarily want this whole thing to be about book/film reviews...but while I'm still working it out, I thought I'd wax poetic on this book:
This book chronicles the day to day trek of its author, Rory Stewart, as he spends several months walking across Afghanistan. He made the journey almost immediately after the 2001 invasion by U.S. and coalition forces. In my opinion, the book should be required reading for Westerners. If you're going to "re-structure", or "regime change", while "bombing the hell" out of a country, you should have some idea of what's on the ground there. At one point, Stewart points out the historical context of his trek:
"The country had been at war for twenty-five years; the new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. Villages combined medieval etiquette with new political ideologies...All that had made Afghanistan seem backward, peripheral, and irrelevant now made it the center of the world's attention."
Aside from being a great read, the real value of Stewart's journey is that he makes Afghanistan such a reality to the reader. He is able to do this because of both his skill as a writer and the fact that he is on the ground the entire time.
Throughout the book, he refuses any sort of transportation, be it by jeep or mule. This is a particularly gutsy move when dozens of soldiers and ex-warlords try to persuade him otherwise; not to mention the expansive Soviet mine fields that cover certain regions of the country. He relies on strangers in small villages to invite him in every night, eating their simple food (oftern dry naan bread and rice). He trudges through waist deep snow at altitudes reaching 14,000ft. He sleeps in crowded rooms on the ground, where the only warmth comes from a small stove burning dung (I'm guessing mule crap). I think that the end result of all this is that one gets an insight to the Afghani daily life. Simply by walking and relying on the country's people and resources, Stewart knows more about the nation than most government agencies working in Kabul to re-build a new Afghanistan.
I highly recommend this book. And if you're worried about it being very dry - it's actually funny at times, and very concise. It is definitely one of the best travel books I have ever read (maybe calling it a ''travel'' book isn't fair...but oh well).
