If someone asked me what is my favorite book this year, I would be in trouble because I have really enjoyed most of my choices this year, but maybe I could say that The places in Between is, in some sort of way, the most remarkable. What I felt while reading this book was very special. It was a passageway for another world. I said and mean to say another world because I realized how the mid-east affairs were alien to me. I had never understood nor tried to understand this region that I only used to heard about it on news on terrorism, violence, war from one religion to another, and women's oppression. After this book, and because it, I started to search more about what is going on middle east and point my interest on Internet, magazines and documentaries. Moreover I read The Osama bin Laden I know, The bookseller of Kabul, the Occupational Hazards – The prince of Marshes (other fantastic book by Rory Stewart) and I am reading the From Beirut to Jerusalem. Because The Places in Between I was awaken to this part of the world I had missed until then and I have started to try figure out what is going on.
I had special feelings about how and from what the book was written. I admire Rory Stewart for his courage and he is for me what I would like to become one day, but I do not have the knowledge, the emotional strong and the unbreakable will as he has got.
The Book is a diary of one part of his twenty-one-month journey on foot throughout Asia. This was to be the last part of this journey. The author followed the footsteps of the first Mughal Emperor of India, called Babur the Great, and walked across Afghanistan from Herat (west) to Kabul (east) in the winter time with snow all over the places and a after-war atmosphere.
With a little Persian communication skills, Stewart arrived in Afghanistan in January 2002, very short after US invasion on Afghani soil on the war on Terrorism. He said he was probably the only tourist in the country at that time and it is not hard to believe. The author's intention was to walk alone for all the route but the immigration service and officials thought he had better take some companion for security reasons. Stewart and his companion started to go across the country in a very cold and hostile terrain, slept in small villages and feeding themselves with the rare food of humble hosts that shared their houses for his safe. The author dedicates his book to the people that helped him trough his journey and realizes that without these people his adventure would never be done (although he puts that a number of these people were 'greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant and cruel', but he tanked for they did not attempt to kidnap or kill him).
Rory Stewart writes with passion and sensibility, despite the fact that he needed for his journey be strong to get respect for the people he met on the way. He shows a very weak and devastated country suffered with almost twenty five years of war. Remote areas and isolated people that live their lives with struggle. This country looks like a forgotten world standing between modern societies.
For those who like to know more about this book, there is a video which Stewart talks about these days on Afghanistan that I put below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeJTBn73M6Y
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