The Kabul Beauty School

This book has been likened to Reading Lolita in Tehran, so when I spotted it on the shelf at the library, I thought it might be worth reading. It’s about an American hairdresser who traveled to Afghanistan with aid organizations, and ultimately founded a beauty school for Afghan women, along with a salon. It was certainly…interesting.

One thing that she addressed early in the book was her sense of initial inadequacy while working with aid groups. She wondered why a hairdresser had been sent to a war zone, and felt like she couldn’t do as much good as the doctors and engineers and so forth that she traveled with. What she learned, however, is that her work turned out to be highly beneficial for morale, and when she established a beauty school, she realized that she could empower Afghan women in a way that other aid workers couldn’t.

She definitely mused on the nature of aid work and privilege a lot, wondering how much good aid workers really do in some areas, as there are some fundamental cultural divides that make aid work much harder. Ultimately, she ended up marrying an Afghan man and relocating to Afghanistan permanently, which I think is pretty neat, and it bespeaks her love for the Afghan people and the culture of the region.

It’s a little glimpse of what life is like in Afghanistan, and for that alone, it was worth reading.

Addendum: As it turns out, this story is a little more complex. I didn’t read up on the book before reading it (or writing this review), and the link above was a reminder that memoirs often leave crucial information out. The women she wrote about are facing death threats, thanks to her frankness, and she didn’t relocate to Afghanistan permanently. In fact, she fled last May, and she hasn’t been back since; apparently love central with her Afghan husband went sour. So much for a feel good read, eh?

Demographics:

The Kabul Beauty School, by Deborah Rodriguez. Published 2007, 275 pages. Biography.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

If you’re as interested in American attitudes about death and the culture of death in America as I am, you need to read this book. The Civil War was a major turning point in American society; perhaps more major than we realize, 150ish years after the fact, and it had a huge impact on the way that we think about death and dying. This book was meticulously researched and simply fascinating; I really found myself drawn in and fascinated by the world of death in the Civil War.

Huge numbers of Americans died in the Civil War, and they died in an era when the “good death” was of paramount importance. The Civil War forced people to rethink death and dying in pretty radical ways, as soldiers died on the field rather than at home in their deathbeds, and as men were mutilated and piled into mass graves. Some families never learned the fate of their loved ones, and in a time when people believed in literal resurrection after the apocalypse, this must have been extraordinarily difficult. In an era when Americans had very precise rituals for dealing with death, everything was turned upside down, and people started to question their faith in a good death, in war, and in religion.

Faust went into the mythology of the good death, and the conditions which prevailed on Civil War battlefields. He talked about the difficulty in identifying soldiers and dealing with their bodies, and he discussed racial and class distinctions in death. Officers, for example, were more likely to be coffined and sent home than ordinary soldiers. The amount of research which must have gone into this book was quite evident, and the book was also extremely well written and engaging. I suppose if you’re less morbid than I am, you might find it hard to stomach, but I’d probably recommend it anyway.

Demographics:

This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust. Published 2008, 346 pages. History/anthropology.

Chasing Kangaroos

This book was both an autobiography and a work of science, intertwining Flannery’s life with his fascination with kangaroos, and it was pretty neat. Kangaroos themselves are rather interesting to begin with, at least in my opinion, and Flannery is quite a character.

Chasing Kangaroos was at once packed with interesting scientific information, and with an honest look at Australian culture and society. At the same time that Flannery was writing about fossilized kangaroo feet, he was also thinking about Aborigines, and the moral implications of eating meat, and the difficulties of motorcycle maintenance, and that’s one of the reasons I really liked the book, because it was at once both very informing, and very human.

I certainly learned a great deal about kangaroos, as he talked about the incredible diversity of modern species, as well as the complexity of kangaroo evolution, a subject which wasn’t really studied until the tail end of the 20th century. Beyond that, I felt like I got a taste of Australian culture, and a sense of the issues which Australia is and will be dealing with.

Flannery is obviously passionately into kangaroos, and the book read almost like a love story, as well as like a cautionary tale. He is obviously concerned about the potential for survival for these natural curiosities, as well as the health of the Australian continent, and I think he made some rather compelling arguments for acting to preserve Australia and its amazing wildlife before it’s too late.

Demographics:

Chasing Kangaroos, by Tim Flannery. Published 2004, 258 pages. Science/biography.