The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart spent almost two years walking across Asia, but was unable to spend any time in Afghanistan until the fall of the Taliban. So in January of 2002, he made his way to Herat, there to begin his walk to Kabul, and thus finish his journey. This book is an account of the five weeks that he spends on foot across the snow-covered mountain passes of Afghanistan.
Stewart writes with a great sense of history, and he has a greater depth of understanding of the various cultures that have interacted to make this part of Afghanistan what it is than most people. This history and culture make their way into his tale, as he describes the background of both the people and the land as he travels through. Throughout the book Stewart also includes quotes from another traveler, the Mughal Emperor Babur, who traveled the same route in the 1500's. It is a fascinating juxtaposition.
I enjoyed this book, especially once Stewart found himself the owner of an unwanted dog, a mastiff with no ears, no tail, and very few teeth, who he names Babur. Experiencing the way that Stewart is treated at each village is engrossing - the hospitality he expects is often not forth-coming, but other times the people are overwhelming in their generosity. Perhaps it is because of the constant war, or because he is Scottish, but many villagers are unwilling to interact with him at all. He travels through snow and minus twenty degree weather, living mainly on bread, unless the villagers have a little more to offer him. The journey definitley does not sound enjoyable in any way. With the addition of Babur, Stewart becomes a more sympathetic character to the reader, yet becomes even more unwelcome in the towns he passes through. We know that he does not get killed in these circumstances, since he did write a book about it, but sometimes you're left wondering how he got away.
With the violence, poverty, and unfriendliness he found in Afghanistan, I wonder what Stewart thought of the rest of his travels. He brings them up sporadically throughout the book - stories of traveling through Iran, India, Nepal. I would love to read about those travels, and I find it strange that Stewart chose to write only about his trip across Afghanistan, at least for this book. The book does give the reader a varied and deeper picture of the tribal regions of Afghanistan, more than any other book I have read about the area. For that reason alone it is worth reading.

Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez

The subtitle of this book is "An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil" but I think that that never really happened in the story. Rodriguez is the American Woman of that subtitle, and she travels to Afghanistan for the first time in 2002 with an NGO providing humanitarian aid. While there, she feels useless: she is not a doctor, nurse, lawyer, or other trained professional that can provide direct aid. She is a hairdresser. She continues to feel out of place until someone introduces her to other Westerners in Kabul as a hairdresser, and suddenly she is everyone's favorite person. Apparently it is impossible to get a good haircut in Kabul. This leads her to the realization that maybe she does have something she can offer to the Afghan people: she can train their women to be hairdressers. Over the next few years she travels between Michigan and Kabul every few months, helping to establish such a school, and staff it. She ends up staying permanently in Afghanistan to ensure the school's success.
This could have been a good book. At least, it may have made a better story, but with Rodriguez telling her own story, I really think she gave a different impression than she intended. She comes off as a selfish American woman who has no respect for the local culture, and could not care less who she offends in her effort to do something positive. She only occassionally seems to see the need to "go under the veil" in any way. She seems insensitive to the uncomfortable situations that she creates with her friends, and with the Afghans who are trying to help her. She allows her friends to arrange a marriage for her to an Afghan man who she does not know(this barely a year after she has finally left her abusive second husband). At this point she speaks little to no Dari, the local language, and she doesn't seem to learn much of it ever. Maybe having a husband makes it safer for women in Kabul, but not every woman is just going to go marry one whom she doesn't know and can't even communicate with.
Aside from my annoyance with Rodriguez's actions while she's in Kabul, what she is doing there is wonderful. Unfortunately, her telling of the story is disjointed, jumping from one year to the next and back again with no real reason. She loves telling the juicy gossip-type stories, and tells of the successes of her former students only in passing. Obviously I was disappointed overall with this book. Maybe the subject material is what got it listed as one of the best non-fiction books of 2007 (according to the King County Library System), because the book itself certainly does not qualify.