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Title: The Places In Between
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Manufacturer: Harvest Books
List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $3.58
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| The Places In Between by Harvest Books Rory, Babur and Babur | I understand and concur to a qualified extent with some of the less than glowing reviews here. Yes, the prose is sparse. Yes, our author doesn't seem to talk very much about himself. Yes, Tom Bissell's review in the NYT is ridiculously encomiastic...."a novelist's sense of character"...??? I wonder what particular novelist Mr. Bissell had in mind. But to counter these criticisms, I would offer two pointed rejoinders.
1) Stewart makes clear that the Emperor Babur's account is the model for his own. Indeed, passages from Babur make up a great part of the book. Readers seemed to have skimmed the passage on p.11 of my copy about Babur:
"At times it seems the only thing missing from the story is himself. He never explains what drives him to live this extraordinary life and take these kinds of risks. He does not describe his emotions, and as a result can seem distant and the episodes of his life, repetitive. Confronted by dead bodies or people trying to kill him, he writes in increasingly dispassionate and impersonal prose. But this restraint only emphasizes the extraordinary nature of his experiences."
Rory has followed Babur's formula to the letter.
2) I can not help but notice how much a sort of class envy hangs over these critical reviews: "bratty", "Eton boy", "super privileged" are just some of the adjectives applied to Mr. Stewart. I would submit to these reviewers that they come across as more than a little ill-natured and absurd. If you have taken the sorts of risks with your life as Rory does here, if you have suffered from dysentery and managed to keep walking through sub-zero weather day upon day, then let fly with the slings and arrows of your resentment. If not, pray don't expose yourself as an armchair yob with a twelve tonne chip on your shoulder.
I don't myself know why Rory took this journey. He doesn't seem to know either. I don't know why he adopted a dog whose teeth had been knocked out by villagers to accompany him, naming him Babur after the emperor. It may well be that he's completely mad. If so, we could do with a little more madness in the world. The book and its author have their flaws, but a lack of intrepidity or kindness, to animals and men, are not among them. Good job, Rory. I'm glad you made it through.
| | The Places In Between by Harvest Books Somewhere in Afghanistan, the Point Got Lost | | It's an odd sensation in a travel book to be guided by a traveler who remains, for 300 pages, a cipher. Stewart reveals virtually nothing about himself or about his motive for undertaking his dangerous, difficult, and (evidently) unrewarding journey--on foot, no less. In fact, there's something distinctly bratty about Stewart's approach to the whole endeavor: he made the trip because he "wanted to," he repeats, and one can almost hear him stamping his foot; his evident lack of any need to support himself for years at a time (he has bundles of cash at his disposal and, at the end of the journey to Afghanistan, returns to "his room" in his parents' house in Scotland) and his conviction that he should be fed and housed by strangers all the way across Afghanistan (but not accompanied or told where to go) have a distinctly elitist and slightly juvenile ring to them, which is not completely surprising given Stewart's parentage and social status (read his Wikipedia biography to get a hint of the manor to which he was born). The people that he meets, meanwhile, are with few exceptions entirely dreadful--dull when they are not outright dangerous, rude when they are not simply miserable, malicious and sadistic when they are not merely indifferent. Nor are the villages he visits anything to write home about, each one essentially identical to another in its revolting, raw-sewage-and-war-debris sameness. The landscape--which Stewart frequently cannot see because he is walking through blinding snowstorms--gets even shorter shrift, and Stewart only occasionally remembers to describe the quality of light at sunset or the shape of a mountain range. Indeed, one gathers that all of that was wholly secondary; his goal was the destination (Kabul), never the journey. (And that's perhaps no surprise, given how ghastly Afghanistan appears in Stewart's version.) The inclusion, meanwhile, of the numerous grade-school-quality sketches that Stewart inked into his journal is a blunder that undermines what little seriousness the book can lay claim to. Stewart hints occasionally that he's bedeviled by unhappy memories or regrets as he walks, but that's as close as he lets anyone come to a glimpse of what's taking place inside his head or of what his reactions are to most of the things that happen to him. That's a fatal flaw in a book that has so little else to offer the reader. If the Afghans are essentially unknowable and alien, if the places are unremarkable and monotonous, and if the narrator slowly disappear as he writes, the whole edifice of the project crumbles. Stewart's only tears in the book are for an animal and never for the human misery he traipses through, as much proof as anyone should surely need that he is (or was) a callow, overprivileged youth on walkabout and that _The Places In Between_ got published through high-society connections and not because Stewart had anything particularly meaningful to say. In a country as barren and forbidding as Afghanistan, the places in between are largely voids, and it is a void that Stewart's book most faithfully transmits. | | The Places In Between by Harvest Books Uninformative | Afghanistan is a country that I wanted to understand better. This book did not help in that regard. Yes, it was an easy read, but I did not learn much about that part of the country. The writer never explained sources of income, sources of food, opportunities or hopes. In the end I felt that I read a book about a man who is taking a stupid journey, and I wasted my time reading about a senseless venture. Why take a walk through central Afghanistan in the middle of the winter with no real reason or support, a few weeks after the fall of the Taliban? Serves him right to freeze, get dysentery and in general have a miserable trip.
If he was on a CIA mission, then it would have been helpful to let us know what he was looking for and how he was going to find the requested information. As is was, it simply seemed a senseless walk. | | The Places In Between by Harvest Books Recommended read but not worthy of higher star rating | The book is a rather detached narration and at the end one feels the author needed to say more; an analysis of the people, their life, the wretchedness and an absolute destruction of the society. it seems that he is unaffected by what he sees!
The value of reading the book is a realization of the absolute devastation of the lives of the Afghans. A rich culture being driven to a primitive state where participants have become numb to their surroundings and life has little value. The book is undoubted peppered with a few good perspectives, such as the global media hype on the Bhuddah's destroyed by the Taliban (a sad affair in its own right) but pale compared to the numerous villages and people burnt and killed by them. | | The Places In Between by Harvest Books Premise seemed interesting | I borrowed this book from a friend, he explained a Scot crosses Afghanistan on foot shortly after 9/11/01. Seems like it would be action packed? Not quite, it must be hard to write a revealing travel journal about a people that aren't very revealing themselves. Although the Muslims do consider themselves first class in terms of hospitality towards travelers believe it or not.
Well, it's a welcome window on a world that we are educated on very little and as you read further you understand why so little is known. First, it is very hard to get to. Second, literacy and technology seem to be very sparce and thus info on this area does not travel far.
An interesting excerpt, one night Mr. Stewart is going to bed as villagers listen to a translated BBC transmission of Bill Gates explaining bundling Internet Explorer with Windows; these villagers marry their first cousins and do not use toilet paper they could not possibly have an idea what Mr. Gates is talking about.
You have to respect Rory's timing in all this, to him it is simply an opportunity to finish his epic trek. And after the reader finds out he can speak Persian fairly fluently that "danger element" an American reader might have intially presumed about his adventure seems to dissolve into a snapshot of conversations that seem perfectly logical.
Bottom line, it's worth your time. But perhaps a little reading up the modern history of Afghanistan wouldn't hurt. Stewart skims the political history in a way that I would have felt shorted if I hadn't read up on it elsewhere. | | The Places In Between by Harvest Books Product Description | In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.
Through these encounters-by turns touching, con-founding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.
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