Purchase

Amazon

Add to Wish List

Also by Said Hyder Akbar:

Come Back to Afghanistan, November 2005
Hardcover

Also by Susan Burton:

Come Back to Afghanistan, November 2005
Hardcover

COME BACK TO AFGHANISTAN
By: Said Hyder Akbar, Susan Burton

The intimate and riveting chronicle of an extraordinarily courageous Afghan-American teenager coming of age in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

Bloomsbury Publishing
November 2005
320 pages
ISBN: 1582345201
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction Memoir

Building on two acclaimed radio documentaries aired on This American Life, Hyder Akbar tells how his ordinary suburban California life was turned upside-down after 9/11. Hyder’s father, a scion of an Afghan political family, sold his business--a hip-hop clothing store in Oakland--and left for Afghanistan, where he became President Hamid Karzai’s chief spokesman and later, the governor of Kunar, a rural province. Obsessed since youth with a country he had never even visited, seventeen-year- old Hyder convinced his father to let him join him on three successive summers. Working alongside his father at the presidential palace and in Kunar has given Hyder a rare front-row seat at the creation of democratic government in Afghanistan. In Come Back to Afghanistan, Hyder interweaves his personal journey--a teenager struggling with his identity in his parents’ homeland--with a dramatic behind- the-scenes account of political and civilian life in post- Taliban Afghanistan. Uncommonly wise and insightful, Hyder travels from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands, revealing Afghanistan as readers have never seen or understood it before.

Media Buzz

Morning Edition - November 25, 2005