Khaled Hosseini is no doubt a great writer, but I ended up disliking this book. It went from a tale of friendship and betrayal to really just being poverty and terror porn. The bad guys are bad. Not just a Taliban, the bad guy also admires Hitler, because he’s half German and one dimensionally evil. There’s no historical discussion of how Afghanistan came to be. There’s no understanding of the complexity that exists in quagmire situations. It’s just simple characters in a war torn land, and wouldn’t be half as popular but for the fact that NATO was currently at war in Afghanistan at the time.
Khaled Hosseini is no doubt a great writer, but I ended up disliking this book. It went from a tale of friendship and betrayal to really just being poverty and terror porn. The bad guys are bad. Not just a Taliban, the bad guy also admires Hitler, because he’s half German and one dimensionally evil. There’s no historical discussion of how Afghanistan came to be. There’s no understanding of the complexity that exists in quagmire situations. It’s just simple characters in a war torn land, and wouldn’t be half as popular but for the fact that NATO was currently at war in Afghanistan at the time.