West of Kabul, East of New York

More about the book

The day after the World Trade Center was destroyed, Tamim Ansary sent an anguished e-mail to twenty friends, discussing the attack from his perspective as an Afghan American. That message, spread via the internet, reached and touched millions of people around the world. Now Ansary gives us 'West of Kabul, East of New York' a moving account of a life lived in two very different cultures, Islamic Afghanistan and the secular West. Born of the first marriage between an Afghan man and an American woman, Ansary grew up in the 'lost world' of pre-war Kabul. When he emigrated America at age 16, he thought he was leaving Afghan culture behind forever. In 1979, however, at the height of the Iranian Revolution, his unresolved identity took him on a harrowing journey through the Islamic world. In the years that followed, he struggled with the emotional issues raised by the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the growing community in the United States, and the radical new ideology emerging Islam and with his own family.