Fiction |
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Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner.
F HOSSEINI
Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds; Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir’s father’s servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him. |
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McCormick, Patricia. Sold.
YA F McC
Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi, though poor, enjoys her life until the Himalayan monsoons wash away her family’s crops and she is sold to a brothel in India by her stepfather. She remembers her mother’s wisdom, “Simply to endure is to triumph,” until the day comes that she can reclaim her life. |
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Myers, Walter Dean. Sunrise Over Fallujah.
YA F Mye
Robin Perry, from Harlem, is sent to Iraq in 2003 as a member of the Civilian Affairs Battalion, and his time there profoundly changes him. |
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Napoli, Donna Jo. Song of the Magdalene.
YA F Nap
Relates the story of Miriam, a young girl being raised by her widowed father in ancient Israel, who grows up to be Mary Magdalene. |
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Satrapi, Marijane. Persepolis.
741.5 Sat
The great-granddaughter of Iran’s last emperor and the daughter of ardent Marxists describes growing up in Tehran in a country plagued by political upheaval and vast contradictions between public and private life. |
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Sheth, Kashmira. Keeping Corner.
YA F She
In India in the 1940s, thirteen-year-old Leela’s happy, spoiled childhood ends when her husband since age nine, whom she barely knows, dies, leaving her a widow whose only hope of happiness could come from Mahatma Ghandi’s social and political reforms. |
 | Staples, Suzanne Fisher. Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind.
YA F Sta
When eleven-year old Shabanu, the daughter of a nomad in the Cholistan Desert of present-day Pakistan, is pledged in marriage to an older man whose money will bring prestige to the family, she must either accept the decision, as is the custom, or risk the consequences of defying her father’s wishes.
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Nonfiction |
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Latifa. My Forbidden Face: Growing up under the Taliban: a young woman’s story.
B Lat
From 1997 to 2001, sixteen-year-old Latifa was a prisoner in her own home as the Taliban wreaked havoc on the lives of Afghan girls and women. This is her testimony—a young woman’s reaction to the inhumanity taking place before her very eyes. Latifa’s life was turned upside down the moment the Taliban took Kabul. The oppressive regime banned women from working, from schools, from public life, even from leaving their homes without a male relative. Female faces were outlawed as the burka, or head-to-toe veil, became mandatory. Latifa had planned to pursue journalism, in a quest for the truth about the ever-shifting power structure in her country. From the Russians to the warring factions, Latifa’s existence had been marred by violence and upheaval. But when the Taliban took over, her world was reduced to the few rooms of her apartment. Like a contemporary Anne Frank, Latifa was forced to observe, absorb, and make sense of what was happening to women, to her country, from the confines of her four walls. Frustrated by the sight of children wandering the streets below, and despite the danger to her own life, Latifa established a school and attempted to defy a regime, one child at a time. |
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Mortenson, Greg & Relin, David Oliver. Three Cups of Tea: one man’s mission to fight terrorism and build nations, one school at a time.
371.822 Mor
Thompson, Sarah L. Three Cups of Tea: one man's journey to change the world... one child at a time.
J 371.822 Tho
One man’s campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti-American reaches of Asia: in 1993 Greg Mortenson was an American mountain-climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan’s Karakoram. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of a Pakistani village, he promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time—Mortenson’s one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban. In a region where Americans are often feared and hated, he has survived kidnapping, death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself—at last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools. |
 | Filipovic, Zlata. Zlata’s Diary: a child’s life in Sarajevo.
YA 949.742 Fil
Zlata began her diary just before her eleventh birthday, when there was peace in Sarajevo and her life was that of a bright, intelligent, carefree young girl. Her early entries describe her friends, her new skis, her family, her grades at school, her interest in joining the Madonna Fan Club. And then, on television, she sees the bombs falling on Dubrovnik. Though repelled by the sight, Zlata cannot conceive of the same thing happening in Sarajevo. When it does, the whole tone of her diary changes. Early on, she starts an entry to "Dear Mimmy" (named after her dead goldfish): "SLAUGHTERHOUSE! MASSACRE! HORROR! CRIMES! BLOOD! SCREAMS! DESPAIR!" We see the world of a child increasingly circumscribed by the violence outside. Zlata is confined to her family's apartment, spending the nights, as the shells rain down mercilessly, in a neighbor's cellar. And the danger outside steadily invades her life. No more school. Living without water and electricity. Food in short supply. The onslaught destroys the pieces she loves, kills or injures her friends, visibly ages her parents. In one entry Zlata cries out, "War has nothing to do with humanity. War is something inhuman." In another, she thinks about killing herself. Yet, with indomitable courage and a clarity of mind well beyond her years, Zlata preserves what she can of her former existence, continuing to study piano, to find books to read, to celebrate special occasions - recording it all in the pages of this extraordinary diary. |
