West Of Kabul East Of San Francisco

A passionate personal journey through two cultures in conflict Shortly after militant Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Tamim Ansary of San Francisco sent an e-mail to twenty friends, telling how the threatened U.S. reprisals against Afghanistan looked to him as an Afghan American. The message spread, and in a few days it had reached, and affected, millions of people-Afghans and Americans, soldiers and pacifists, conservative Christians and talk-show hosts; for the message, written in twenty minutes, was one Ansary had been writing all his life. West of Kabul, East of New York is an urgent communiqué by an American with "an Afghan soul still inside me," who has lived in the very different worlds of Islam and the secular West. The son of an Afghan man and the first American woman to live as an Afghan, Ansary grew up in the intimate world of Afghan family life, one never seen by outsiders. No sooner had he emigrated to San Francisco than he was drawn into the community of Afghan expatriates sustained by the dream of returning to their country -and then drawn back to the Islamic world himself to discover the nascent phenomenon of militant religious fundamentalism. Tamim Ansary has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices on the conflict between Islam and the West. His book is a deeply personal account of the struggle to reconcile two great civilizations and to find some point in the imagination where they might meet.

West of Kabul, East of San Francisco is the highlights of my life story. Keeping a diary is not common in developing countries such as Afghanistan, and this makes autobiographies less common in these countries. The existing biographies and autobiographies in the Islamic countries are mostly those about the Prophet Mohammad and other important religious figures or monarchs. These biographies, however, are full of praise. This historic precedent has also had its effect on autobiographies written by Western-educated Afghans. They too are full of praise and criticisms of rivals, rarely talking about their own problems and weaknesses. In other words, they are mostly self-centered and egotistical in nature. In West of Kabul, East of San Francisco, I have tried to be as objective as possible in avoiding such pitfalls. I describe events and relationships as realistically as possible. But I realize that no one can entirely escape the influence of their mother culture.

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real; but it sits atop an older struggle, between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan: a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam. Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out, and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons while, every 40 to 60 years, a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made. Told in conversational, storytelling style, and focusing on key events and personalities, Games without Rules provides revelatory insight into a country at the center of political debate.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 In Afghanistan, people lived in compounds, where they spent all their time with their group. In the West, we spend most of our time alone, because we’re too afraid of being alone. #2 In Afghanistan, people lived in compounds, where they spent all their time with their group. In the West, we spend most of our time alone because we're too afraid of being alone. #3 In Afghanistan, people lived in compounds where they spent all their time with their group. In the West, we spend most of our time alone because we're too afraid of being alone. #4 My dad, who was from Afghanistan, was given a scholarship to study in the US. He went to the University of Illinois, and when he tried to find housing, landlords slammed the door in his face because he was Asian. His bloodline could never be taken away from him.

Road Trips, a memoir by Tamim Ansary, recounts stories from his years as part of the American '60s and '70s counterculture-except, he's not really a part of it. Born and raised in Afghanistan, Ansary came to America at age 16, just in time to get swept away by the tsunamis of the Sixties. This is the story of an outsider trying to become an insider by dropping out of a society he's not part of in the first place. In the process, he hitchhikes across the North America from coast to coast with five dollars in his pocket, spends a night in an abandoned gas station in Nebraska during an apocalyptic blizzard, misses Woodstock but only by a f ew miles, drops acid and encounters the terrors of The Void, hobnobs with Baba Ram Dass at an ashram in Vermont, and goes on a four-month road trip that begins as a quest for True Home and ends in the Yucatan jungle with a girlfriend who is waiting for her other boyfriend. The stories unfold against a familiar background-communes and collectives, Woodstock and Watergate, sex, dope, acid, and rock'n'roll-but ultimately this is not a history of those all-too-chronicled times; rather, it is a philosophic meditation on the mythic private journey from clueless childhood to contemplative old age.

From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.