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General Writing. Send in your best work – poems, short stories, essays. (Feel free to do it throughout the year, but this gives you a deadline.)
Deadline: Oct. 10.

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  • Click "create content" and create an ENTRY
  • Fill out "title," "author name, school & grade" and "prompt" boxes.
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Come Back to Afghanistan

Submitted by ggevalt on October 23, 2007 - 11:08.

Akbar, Said Hyder and Susan Burton. Come Back to Afghanistan. Bloomsbury, 2006. $14.95ISBN9781596910683 (pap.); Bloomsbury, 2005. $24.95. ISBN 978-1582345208.

YWP BOOK FORUM

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Genre: Memoir

Themes: Post 9/11 life in Afghanistan, family, the Taliban, tribes, government and travel.

Author information: Said Hyder Akbar was a high school student when he decided to follow his father to his homeland of Afghanistan in 2003. He is currently a student at Yale University. Akbar has started his own company to rebuild schools and pipelines in a rural province in Afghanistan.

Susan Burton is a writer and contributing editor to the NPR radio program This American Life .

Plot Summary: A chronicle of Akbar’s experiences and reactions of three summers in Afghanistan observing and helping his father set up a provincial government.

Booktalk: After 9/11, Said’s father was asked to come back to Afghanistan by Hamid Karzai to help rebuild the war-torn country. Said, a high school student at the time, followed his father. Armed with a tape recorder (used for the radio documentaries for This American Life ) he captured everything he saw and heard, from life on the streets to secret meetings. The result is a heart-warming look at a country most know very little about. We come to care deeply for the people we are introduced to and the future of their beautiful mountainous country.

Curriculum tie-ins:

History:

  • Research the history of Afghanistan.
  • Discuss how landscape affects government.
  • Discuss the interference of other countries in a country’s rebuilding effort.
  • Discuss what democracy and freedom mean to you.
  • Research and discuss Islam and sects.

English

  • Read a novel set in Afghanistan and compare it to this memoir.
  • Pick one memorable time in your life and write about it.
  • Turn this piece of writing into a story or a poem.

If you loved this, you’ll like:

  • Barakat, Ibtisam. Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood . FSG, 2007.
  • Ellis, Deborah. The Breadwinner . Groundwood Books, 2001.
  • Hosseini, Kahlid. The Kite Runner . Penguin Group, 2004.
  • Stewart, Rory. Places in Between . Harcourt, 2006.

Additional resources:

  • “This American Life” (2003); Episode 230. and Episode 254
  • Johnson, Chris. Afghanistan : The Background, the Issues, the People . Oxfam Publishing, 2004.
  • Jones, Ann. Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan . Picador, 2007.
  • Klaits, Alexander. Love and War in Afghanistan . Seven Stories Press, 2006.
  • Tanner, Stephen. Afghanistan : A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban . Perseus Publishing, 2003.

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