I confess that my knowledge of Afghanistan has been fairly limited to the few things I’ve seen or read in the news or Khaled Hosseini’s body of work (well, add Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil to my fairly limited list). So when my library book club selected Jenny Nordberg’s investigative journalistic book, The Underground Girls of Kabul, I wasn’t sure what to think. But after I read, I felt that a new world and source of activism had opened up for me. While on an […]
The Underground Girls of Kabul
Since 2001, when a coalition led by the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, a lot of attention was paid to the “rebuilding” of the Islamic republic. Most of what we hear in the news is focused on the deprivation, constant skirmishes between Taliban (and Taliban adjacent groups) attacking Western forces, corruption, and deplorable conditions for women and girls. It sounds like an overwhelmingly hopeless situation. Jenny Nordberg acknowledges these dire situations, but explores the nuances and reveals that even in such hopelessness, there’s small rays of resistance […]
Girls In Pants
I don’t remember exactly what caught my eye about this book, if it was the cover, the blurb, the title itself, janniethestrange’s review, or any other of the many things which could have done it. But I know that I probably plopped it on to my to read list simply because I know what I don’t know, and I don’t know much about Afghanistan, even though the American war there started as I was coming into my adulthood and had definite opinions about why we […]