A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz Book

I was irritated early on by the way this book was written. I think it encompasses all my other grips about the book.

Basically the situation is like this: a woman journalist is in Kabul after 9/11. She meets this bookseller, lives with his family a few months with only 3 people in the family speaking English and then she writes a book about them.

First of all, having lived abroad and lived abroad with families, you can't know a family the way this author pretends to in that time. We don't even know how she interacted with the family because she writes herself out of the book entirely. She somehow thinks that she hasn't effected the family's life and that she can just describe them as if there is not some strange white woman sitting on the floor taking notes as they live their lives.

The book is written with such heavy condescension that I wanted to throw up. The moral I took away from the book is that life in Afghanistan sucks, especially if you are a woman, and it's all due to their stupid culture. Warning, this is not what I think, this is what I think the author was telling me to think.

The author says in the preface that she was inspired by this family. But from how she wrote the book it seems she was disgusted. I don't understand how she can write that way without even writing herself in, therefore allowing the follies of inter cultural miscommunication and misunderstanding play a part.