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An intimate and riveting account of
post 9/11 Afghanistan, told by an extraordinarily courageous
Afghan-American teenager coming of age in one of the most
potent settings of our time.
Building on two acclaimed radio documentaries
aired on This American Life, Hyder Akbar tells how
his ordinary suburban California life was turned upside-down
after 9/11. Hyder’s father, a scion of an Afghan political
family, sold his business—a hip-hop clothing store in
Oakland—and left for Afghanistan, where he became President
Hamid Karzai’s chief spokesman and later, the governor
of Kunar, a rural province. Obsessed since youth with a country
he had never even visited, seventeen-year-old Hyder convinced
his father to let him join him on three successive summers.
Working alongside his father at the presidential palace and
in Kunar has given Hyder a rare front-row seat at the creation
of democratic government in Afghanistan. In Come Back to
Afghanistan, Hyder interweaves his personal journey—a
teenager struggling with his identity in his parents’
homeland—with a dramatic behind-the-scenes account of
political and civilian life in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Uncommonly
wise and insightful, Hyder travels from palaces to prisons
and from Kabul to the borderlands, revealing Afghanistan as
readers have never seen or understood it before.
Said Hyder Akbar is currently a
college student. He is also the co-director and founder of
his own non-governmental organization, Wadan Afghanistan,
which has rebuilt schools and constructed pipe systems in
rural Kunar province. He is now twenty.
Susan Burton is a contributing editor
of This American Life, and a former editor at Harper’s.
Her writing appears in the New York Times Magazine.
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