Book Review
Drawing on observations from the streets and university classrooms and from personal interviews with lawyers, journalists, politicians, and military personnel, this riveting investigation examines the most compelling aspects of Pakistan’s culture and history. Written by an American journalist living in Pakistan, the issues and struggles of Pakistan and its people as the United States’s war on terror unfolds are addressed.
This powerful report offers vivid descriptions of life in Lahore and humanizes the nation’s struggles by delving into every dimension of the Pakistani experience, including domestic politics; ethnic, regional, and sectarian fault lines; anti-Western and anti-Indian sentiments; and the border issues between Kashmir and Afghanistan.
An engaging work, the findings connect this volatile nation to its precarious place in the international realm.
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From the Author’s blog.
Americans and the American media and publishing establishment tend to consider Pakistan worth writing about only when it?s framed in the context of U.S. foreign policy. To me this myopic habit of mind is personified in the New York literary agent who asked me, when I told him I had published a book on Pakistan: ?What?s your argument?? I was so nonplussed by the question that I could scarcely blurt out the answer. The answer is that I?m not making an argument; I?m telling a story.
If I have an argument, it?s implicit. My books are first-person travel narratives, not only because that?s the kind of book I?m able and willing to write, but also because that?s the kind of book that rarely gets written about Pakistan in particular, and one I feel that country needs and deserves. The Daily Telegraph?s reviewer was both kind and correct when he wrote that ?the author?s real journey is a search for common humanity.?
If you want to get to know the Pakistan that I know, read Alive and Well in Pakistan. It covers the first decade of my acquaintance with that country, between the years 1994 and 2004, and includes chapters about my visits to the Indian-occupied Kashmir Valley in 1994 and 1995 as well as the semester I spent teaching journalism at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore in 2003-04.
