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| Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan | 
 enlarge | Author: Ann Jones
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $2.98
You Save: $11.02 (79%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (24 reviews)
Sales Rank: 442996
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312426593
Dewey Decimal Number: 297
EAN: 9780312426590
ASIN: 0312426593
Publication Date: March 6, 2007
Release Date: March 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Soon after the bombs stopped falling on Kabul, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city. This is her trenchant report from the city where she spent the next four winters working in humanitarian aid. Investigating the city's prison for women, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, Jones enters the lives of everyday women and men and reveals through small events some big disjunctions: between the new Afghan "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between American promises and performance, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends upon our own.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Seeing is Believing November 17, 2008
This is a scorcher of a book and Ann Jones is a brilliant writer who makes the brutality of life in Afghanistan so real that the people she writes about jump off the page and into your head and heart. Jones, a journalist, went to Afghanistan to work with an international NGO (nongovernmental organization) that seeks to improve the lives of Afghan women and children. This is a mission that seems impossible, given all the constraints, both cultural and political, that are brought to bear on any logical effort to address the grinding poverty and despair in this unhappy place.
Some reviewers have criticized Jones's account as naive, asserting that she does not take into account the political realities surrounding Afghanistan, but that is exactly the reason that I found her book so compelling. From Jones we get no excuses or rationalizations as to why Afghanistan is a perennial pawn in the "great game" of world power. And she makes few apologies for a culture that dehumanizes women and girls, the first step to making it OK for men to trade and treat them like animals (or worse). Jones tells it like it is, which is a very different story than we get from governments and the entrenched international development professionals. Jones was an eyewitness to how big development plans play out on the ground, and she relays her truth in a style that is as unsparing as the rigid, tribal rules that impede progress.
This book is wrenching and at times painful to read, but I argue that it is important for anyone who wants to have a full view of our world today and the events that are currently shaping it. While it's clearly true that Ann Jones has an alternate take on the reasons behind Afghanistan's present, foul condition, hers is a voice that needs to be heard and her subjects are people whose stories deserve to be told.
Seeing is believing ? September 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Once again we have all these "The planets revolves around me people" writing very naive opinions about a book concerning a foreign land. It is so sad when people in effect are saying "HEY THIS IS HOW THE WORLD WORKS !!!", while there are most likely people in every other country saying the same thing: "This is how it works, this is how it works, and so on and so on. It is this very human way of thinking that has spawned so many wars, therefore if knowledge is power, then the wrong knowledge must make people powerless. Finally, I don't believe the author was writing in absolutes or with political motives, read and judge for yourself, but try to read other books related to the subject and I think your find the author is spot on, from the westerners point of view.
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan August 12, 2008
An amazing book. Kudo's to Ann Jones for bringing back such an amazing inside look at the Afghan culture and weaving her experiences into a fantastic story. It read almost like a book of fiction.
 Sorting fact from fiction and diatribe from dialogue March 15, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
It is difficult to read a book about Kabul, or Afghanistan more generally, without feeling enormous sadness. The strategic location of Afghanistan, the politics and the tribal rivalries all make for a degree of inherent instability even without the successive superpower manipulations by other countries including Britain, the USSR and the USA.
Ms Jones's book is both illuminating and irritating. Her keen and passionate observations provide powerful images of aspects of Afghanistan. Ultimately, though, her views about politicians and the failure of international organisations undermine her effectiveness as they easily enable readers to take issue with her objectivity. I think that is a pity. I don't know what Ms Jones hoped to achieve by doing this but I am reasonably certain that it has not resulted in any sustained consequential improvement for the life of women in Afghanistan generally.
Kabul in winter can be a very bleak place indeed.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
 Unsupported Bias Overcomes Thoughtful Narrative January 26, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
Ms. Jones' naive and nihilistic view on the international community's attempt to reconstruct Afghanistan ruins what starts out to be a promising and revealing book on the Afghani people. In her view, she is the only person who has ever really succeeded in accomplishing anything worthwhile for Afghanistan. Although her descriptions of daily life in Afghanistan, the deplorable treatment of women, and the unfortunately slow building of a genuine Afghani national identity that never existed before evoke empathy and genuine disbelief, the wonderful narratives are lost in her simplistic politics and inaccurate history. She presents many facts supporting her very biased judgements but leaves out many more that offer balance to current conditions and paint a more realistic view of this war torn country. She also goes well out of her way to continually blame the United States for many of Afghanistan's problems while flippantly passing over the fact that the Afghanis themselves have been and continue to be the real source of the cultural and historical obstacles that must be overcome to secure peace
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