Reviews for The bookseller of Kabul

The average rating for The bookseller of Kabul based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-09 00:00:00 Craig Root After finishing the book, I was quite surprised at the number of negative reviews here in Goodreads. Maybe a huge culture shock is at play here. Many in the West may be put off by the realization that the values that they take for granted may be totally unheard of in certain parts of the world. There *are* certain cultures where children are nothing but tools for parents and as such, are actively denied education. There *are* cultures where falling in love is a greater "crime" than sawing off a person's head. I know for a fact that people in my culture have gotten used to murders and negligence of human rights, but if a couple were caught kissing in public, as it were the very fabric of society would be shred to smithereens. There *are* societies where women are nothing more than baby-making and house-keeping machines, commodities which are to be sold off in the financial ritual of marriage. Since I grew up in a culture not vastly different from the one portrayed in this book, I find it hard to dismiss this account as prejudiced hogwash. That, and I also steer clear of any sort of cultural relativism. I know for a fact that no one in the comparatively progressive world would want to be a woman in Afghan society after reading this book, even more so after living in the country for some time by himself/herself. The author may not have captured Afghan culture in its entirety(and no where has she made that claim), but she has been anything but prejudiced. For me, the pathos in this book lies in the hopes and aspirations of the members of the Khan family living in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. The women want education and a job, the children want to play, young men and women of the country want to fall in love in spite of knowing the dire consequences, and Sultan Khan wants to contribute towards building a better and liberal Afghanistan, a country which he can boast of to the world. This book draws a very humane picture of an obscure society, a picture that very often fails to filter through the coloured glasses of mainstream media.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-04-11 00:00:00 Jorge Cristoffanini 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.