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| Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan | 
 enlarge | Author: Ann Jones
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $4.94
You Save: $19.06 (79%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $1.86
Avg. Customer Rating:  (24 reviews)
Sales Rank: 281164
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 0805078843
Dewey Decimal Number: 958.104
EAN: 9780805078848
ASIN: 0805078843
Publication Date: March 21, 2006
Release Date: March 21, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A sharp and arresting people?s-eye view of real life in Afghanistan after the Taliban
Soon after the bombing of Kabul ceased, award-winning journalist and women?s rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city, determined to bring help where her country had brought destruction.
Here is her trenchant report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Working among the multitude of impoverished war widows, retraining Kabul?s long-silenced English teachers, and investigating the city?s prison for women, Jones enters a large community of female outcasts: runaway child brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape. In the streets and markets, she hears the Afghan view of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban, and learns that regarding women as less than human is the norm, not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked?by Communists, Islamic fundamentalists, and the Western free marketeers?always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S promises and performance, between the new ?democracy? and the still-entrenched warlords, 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 so much upon our own.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Choking on the Lies January 1, 2009
This book is so full of bias and bigotry that I couldn't decide whether to laugh or vomit. The author has an obvious anti-American, anti-male, and anti-aid organization bias that transcends any attempt made to provide accurate information.
I am currently living and working in the same areas as the author mentioned, in fact I eat in the same cafeteria. I've yet to see an Afghan get treated with anything but respect by soldiers, guards, and contractors. The author might be so educated that she simply cannot grasp the basics of the current situation in Afghanistan.
If she wants to pass on her "pie in the sky" ideals, then maybe she should consider getting grounded in the facts rather than twist and contort every situation to conform to her worldview.
If you like reading venomous words full of lies, then you'll love this book. Otherwise, take it off your wish list.
 Seeing is Believing November 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan August 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 10 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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