Have read (and loved) the book but not seen the movie yet. I keep telling my Texan friends who are excited about Charlie Wilson’s War to go see Kite Runner afterwards. KR qualifies as the sobering sequel to the much hyped and glamorous CWW.

saw KR today. It was nice but I liked CWW better. KR was too slow and mushy mushy for my tastes though its storyline was better.

dude, there are thousand (hazaar) books written on it – any detailed WW history book will tell you. that’s for the patronizing tone in response to an honest question. stay classy will you?

Look who’s talking…

do you have any citations on this? (i.e., where’d you read this?)

The book was sooooo good!!!! There were a couple of cheesy aspects of it, but the people that he described were very similar to Indians. Here are some less believable aspects of the book that I found: 1. I thought that when the protagonist visits/talks to his dad’s friend, Rahim, the ensuing conversation didn’t seem believable. Rahim mentions “the Americans have made you very optimistic just like themselves.” I’m sure that there is no word for optimism in Farsi/Pashto, and moreover, Desis, Middle Easterners, Central Asians, or Africans at that never comment on optimism at all. It seems that they don’t notice this quality. 2. The protagonists life in the USA isn’t consistent with their upper class lifestyle in Afghanistan. I would have thought that they lived nobly and have upper class ideals and values. I would have thought thought that they had a clean home, but the book seemed to imply that their apartment was not clean. I would think that their apartment would have been austere but very clean.
3. I know many Indians who come here at the age of 6, and they are very Indianish. They seem to be very inwards looking and insular as far as mixing with others goes. Also, they seem to be very Indian in their tastes (movies, food, fiscal prudence, and ideals). I’m not saying that they all are like this, but they all seem to like Zee TV and Bollywood, and are less stoic than Americans. However, this protagonist seemed to be very American. He didn’t act macho-macho, he didn’t have many Afghani or Pashtun friends, whereas others in his situation would have had ONLY Afghani/Paki friends.
4. If I were to have written this story, I would have made the protagonist work at a fast-food or in retail some where. One improvement of Afghani culture is there pride in work – Indians feel that some jobs are beneath them.
5. The boy’s circle of friends would have been 95% Muslims. I base this on my observations of people who’ve spent their formative years in another country coming to the USA.

I noticed a lot of similarities with India as well as differences: 1. It seemed to me that the people of Afghanistan are slightly more un-ambitious than Indians living here. Every Indian that I know works very hard, often at 2 jobs – including cultivating their own business. The Afghanis seemed to not to be materially motivated or ambitious. Moreover, their educational achievements seemed to be less.
2. They were very similar in their pronouncement of words (i.e. “Amreeka” and “jaan” for ‘-ji’), their cultural conservatism (implied caste system of Pashtuns over Hazara, and “marriage into a good family”).

All in all, the book was excellent, but the movie sucked. I couldn’t stand the film. Young Assef looked NOTHING like older Assef, and moreover, they didn’t even look half German! Where was Assef’s brass knuckles in the movie? I loved this prop in the book.

The father wasn’t very big in the movie. He should have been very physically imposing, heavily bearded, and more spirited and less thoughtful/pensive. A more bearded and rotund version of Badshah Khan (Frontier Gandhi) would have been perfect.

that’s for the patronizing tone in response to an honest question. stay classy will you?

Leon Trotsky was a Nazi, we all knew it for a fact: Pravda said it, we all read it before the Hitler-Stalin pact

Once a nazi, would be a shot, see That was then the party line. Now a nazi’s, hotsy-totsy Volga boatmen sail the Rhine

The incomparable Bengali author Syed Mujtaba Ali wrote a gem of a book about Afghanistan which is as scholarly as it is entertaining. It is my favorite among all the travelogues I have read in both English and Bengali (Dalrymple’s included). The amazing thing is that much of what he wrote of his travels there in the 1930s is still relevant to Afghanistan’s fate today. He also addressed the British – Russian Great Game over Afghanistan in exquisite detail but with a clear bias toward the Soviets. (Being a subject of British occupied India, that is not too surprising.) To the Bengali readers here, I recommend Ali’s books highly. The title is “Deshe Bideshe.” I am not aware of an English translation.

It takes a geo/logist/physicist to cut through the charlie. Thanks Kush. WW2 was very much a battle over oil. The Holocaust must be seen separately from the war. It is a crime among the darkest chapters of human history – but not merely a war crime. The Holocaust was a few years old by the time WW2 broke out.

Now, to oil, synopsis from Chapter 17, The Prize by Daniel Yergin.

Ch. 17: Germany’s Formula for War

I.G. Farben’s research on synthetic fuels (1913 Bergius process of hydrogenation) leads to an alliance with Standard of Jersey (328-31). Nazified I.G. Farben’s synthetic fuels produce 46% of Germany’s oil in 1940 (332-33). Blitzkrieg and oil scarcity (333-34). Oil and Hitler’s invasion of Russia (334-36). Operation Blau, to seize oil of the Caucasus: ironically, “the Germans ran short of oil in their quest for oil”; “the blitzkrieg phase was over” (336-39). Rommel’s contempt for “the quartermaster’s advice” controverted by failure in North Africa (339-43). Speer’s reorganized German economy depends on synthetic fuels made by slave labor, e.g. at Auschwitz (343-46; 817). Beginning in May 1944, Allied air attacks on synthetic fuel plants and other oil facilities are a “fatal blow” (Gen. Adolph Galland) (346-48). Battle of the Bulge: Col. Jochem Peiper’s panzer unit almost seizes Stavelot fuel supply’s 2.5m gallons of fuel (348-49). No fuel left in war’s last months (349-50).