February 2010: West of Kabul, East of New York (Ansary)

Post date: Mar 03, 2010 7:45:43 PM

Thanks to Jane for hosting our February 17 discussion of West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story by Berkeley professor Tamim Ansary. The classes of '46 through '06 were represented in our group of 13, most of whom found the book interesting at least in parts, and especially appreciated its picture of life in Afghanistan during a certain period.

Maggie and Betsey both found his somewhat flip tone off-putting, and Maggie felt he oversimplified history too much. Several attendees had listened to the book read by the author, rather than reading it. They had no problem with his tone, perhaps because they got a more personal version, hearing it in his own voice. The same was true of Nancy, who knows Ansary from attending his courses at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute http://www.olli.berkeley.edu/.

Kathryn and others highly recommended another of his books, Destiny Disrupted.

A number of us felt that the underlying idea of the three different paths taken by the three Ansary siblings was something we wished had been more fully developed.

Our talk then moved on to a broader discussion of the challenges in Afghanistan, and the difficulties in solving economic problems which are intertwined with social constructs and cultural norms which resist change. We contrasted the difficulty of getting farmers to switch from poppy production to other crops with the surprisingly widespread adoption of mobile phones in many underdeveloped countries, and postulated that getting a population to adopt a new solution for a previously-unsolved problem was much easier than getting them to switch from an existing known solution to an unknown new one.