Ansary’s literary memoir tells the story of a life that straddles the fault line between Islam and the West: his father, hailing from an ancestral line rich in Sufi mystics, was one of the first ten Afghans sent abroad by his government for a Western-style education; and hIs mother was the first American woman to marry an Afghan and live in Afghanistan as an Afghan. Ansary and his sister Rebecca were thus the first Afghan-Americans.

Ansary sketches “the Lost World”— Afghanistan before contact with the West, a world of tightly-knit clans living in large compounds surrounded by high walls in a large city that is really a densely interwoven fabric of private villages permeated by Islam. His story then moves to tiny Lashkargah, the headquarters of an American aid project in southwestern Afghanistan, eight square blocks of any California suburb transported to the banks of a river in Afghanistan, a mile upstream from the ruins of a thousand-year-old city, and surrounded by a desert wasteland as far as the eye can see. Here, Ansary begins a dual life—Afghan by day, American by night.

The author then explores the theme of the bifurcated cultural identity as his story moves to United States, to the sixties counterculture, to travels across North Africa and Turkey,  and finally to the psychological journey Afghan refugees and exiles have gone through in America since the Soviets invaded their country.

Go here to order your copy of West of Kabul, East of New York.
Richard Eder, writing for the New York Times, calls West of Kabul, East of New York “a book that steadies our skittering compass. Pointing east and west it signals not galactic opposites but two ends of a needle we can hold in our hand. … It speaks with modesty of tone and is all the more resonant for that reason; it searches by sifting… His book sees things we cannot make out, and need to.”

John Nichols, writing for the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, says, “West of Kabul, East of New York is … not a polemic of globalization or imperialism. In fact, it is essentially an autobiography. Yet, in his exploration of the Afghanistan he knew as a youth and of the practice of Islam to which he was exposed there, he opens vast horizons of understanding… about the price of progress in this perhaps too modern world.”

Roger Downey writes in the Seattle Weekly, “Ansary’s authorial voice is so unemphatic, so over-a-beer conversational that you’re surprised to find tears rising or rage beginning to choke you as you learn about the interminable geopolitical catastrophe that is the author’s birthplace. … West of Kabul, East of New York is one of those rare pieces of journalism–Rebecca West’s dispatches from Nuremberg come to mind, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima—that don’t just record history but make it.”

Jessie Thorpe, writing for United Press International, calls Ansary a “gifted storyteller,” and goes on to say: “Woven into his stories are lucid explanations of Islam, the history of Afghanistan, the heroes of his youth, what school was like in bare classrooms with no books, how women lived, the joys and cruelties of Islamic society — all of it highly educational and absolutely painless to absorb. In addition to ‘speaking’ beautifully, this author is capable of painting large colorful canvases with his words.”

West of Kabul, East of New York has been included ont he following lists:

Favorite Books of 2002 by Amazon.com

Best Books of 2002 by Christian Science Monitor

Best Adult Books for High School Students, by The School Library Journal

Recommended pick for the week of April 4, 2003, by the New York Times

Favorite Book Picks for 2002 selection by Written Voices (Online Book Review)

Recommended Readings Archives , Queens Borough Public Library

Best Books of the Year in 2002 by the San Jose Mercury

It has also been chosen as:

Common freshman reading selection by Carleton College, Temple University, Albion College, La Guardia Community College, and Tulane University.

One Book, One Community selection by Waco, Texas.

One Book, One Community selection by Orland, Illinois.

New Hampshire Reads selection, April 2003.

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By Farah Ahmedi with Tamim Ansary

Earlier this year, I helped a girl named Farah Ahmedi write her life story for a contest sponsored by Simon and Schuster and Good Morning America. Farah told me her story over the course of five days this January. I then translated the tapes of those itnerviews into English and rendered them into a book. Farah’s story won the contest and so her book is now available at bookstores and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Let me just note that Farah has had an astounding life. Before I met her, I could only cite the staggering statistics about the hundreds upon thousands of disabled orphans in Afghanistan, children who lost limbs to land mines and also lost their families to the endless war–heartbreaking enough as mere skeletal fact, but Farah is the living embodiment of that story. Read her book and you’ll find out how this plucky, gutsy, determined and somehow still ebullient girl survived the horrors of her life and made it to refuge in Chicago, virtually carrying her ailing mother on her back.

For more about Farah and her book, go to SimonSays

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Gulmamadak the Great
An Afghan folktale retold: Gulmamad is a grown man, but everyone in the village–even his wife–insists on calling him Gulmamadak, which means “Little Gulmamad the Cute.” So Gulmamadak leave the village to do great deeds and gain some respect. Reading level: 4th to 5th grade.

Holiday Histories: The Complete Set This 12-book series, written at the first-grade level, uses various political holidays as windows for presenting relevant topics in history. For example, Labor Day provides a frame for telling the story of the Industrial REvolution and the labor movement–all in 26 pages with no more than 25 words per page.

Native Americans (Set) This ten-book set, written at the second grade level, covers the various Native American cultures of North America, with a description of the environment of each region, the cultures that flourished there before the advent of the Europeans, the consequences of their encounters with Europeans, and what is happening with the Native Americans of that region today. Each book draws strong connection between the environment and native culture of each region, but emphasizes that Native Americans are modern people existing today. For example: Arctic Peoples looks at the people of the far north, the Inuit and the Aleuts.

Cool Collections: Insects is part of a series for first graders that uses various types of collections–stamps, dolls, natural objects, and so on–as a tool for introducing children to critical thinking skills such as cassifying and categorizing.

Alien Alert is part of a series of educational comic books called Adventures Plus. Each page tells a story but also has an embedded activity. To move from one page to the next, readers need to complete the activity. The stories are written at the 5th grade level, and the skills are coded to those in the Texas and national curriculum standards for that grade level. Alien Alert, for example, focuses on vocabulary skills such as prefixes and antonyms. The Case of the Missing Millie, by contrast, emphasizes real-life and study skills such as reading maps and bus schedules and tracking expenses.

Grammar Handbook Is there such a thing as a grammer handbook that makes you laugh? There’s one. This one. Goes with Adventures Plus.

Science All Around Us: Matter presents basic concepts about matter with simple experiements first-graders can perform to comprehend such concepts in physics as weight, denisty, volume, and precipitation.

The Lost Boy and Spiders from Outer Space are high-interest low-readability novels for students of high school age reading at a third-grade level or below.

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