The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
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Book Reviews of The Places In Between
Book Review: When History Meets the Now
Summary: 5 Stars
Rory Stewart writes an amazing tale that is both raw, authentic and self-deprecating. His analysis of the cultures of Afghanistan are insightful at times, yet often clouded in his own inability to enter the mist that is Afghanistan. He weaves a story of vignettes that recount lineages, ancient histories, modern bumblings and humorous anecdotes. I was gripped by the ruggedness of his account and spell-bound by a culture so far removed from my own (while uncomfortably striking too close to home).
Rory has managed to be both entertaining and educational at the same time, which few are truly capable of doing. For someone that frequently mentions his desire to travel alone, he has taken us all along with him (sometimes even dragging us as his own "Babur"). I look forward to joining him on some of his other mis-adventures in the future. Till then...Salaam.
Book Review: A man and his dog in the mountains
Summary: 4 Stars
There is a lot to admire about this book. It is extremely well written, involving, respectful, and informative about the mountainous highlands of Afghanistan and the people who live there. The men that Rory Stewart meets shed much needed light on a much misunderstood area of the world.
I am still uneasy about Mr. Stewart essentially begging his way across Afghanistan. There is something dubious about spending lots of resources, time and effort to get half way around the world and then expect people who are struggling just to survive to provide for you,and your dog.
Mr. Stewart now runs the non-profit Blue Mountain Foundation in Kabul developing local arts and crafts.
Book Review: Not a Smooth Read
Summary: 4 Stars
Very difficult to read because it is padded with quoted passages in smaller print and footnotes. The quotes from Babur's travels are relevant to the adventure, but I wish Mr. Stewart had found a less annoying way to include them.
While we never learn why the author made this trip--other than it was the final leg of his journey--I think he was about as well prepared, educated, and experienced as a westerner could be in that part of the world. Still, it was a ridiculously dangerous thing to do and I fear that there are idiots out there who know nothing other than how to walk who will attempt the same trip.
Other reviewers complain that the author did not spend enough time describing the views as he walked. I disagree. How much is there to say about snowy, cold mountainous winter landscapes? I think he covered the geographic descriptions pretty well.
I felt, as did the author, that the looting of the priceless antiquities is a terrible shame. He was very restrained in his retelling of what he witnessed, but I could feel his horror.
For me the best part of the story was Rory Stewart's adoption of the dog, Babur. Until the dog appeared Mr. Stewart seemed sort of robotic. His affection and his attempts to care for the dog warmed my heart and added some humanity to the book. I don't know how a huge dog like that who walked miles a day in the cold could survive on scraps of bread and water. I so hoped that Babur would make it back to Scotland so he could live a life of well fed leisure for his remaining days.
It was interesting to me that women were almost invisible on this trip. The few he did meet had never been more than a few miles outside their remote villages.
Even though this book is very frustrating to read I think I will remember it long after the other books I read during the last few months. For that and its uniqueness it deserves four stars. I do want to advise Mr. Stewart to not give-up his day job to become an artist.
Book Review: Rory, Babur and Babur
Summary: 4 Stars
I understand and concur to a qualified extent with some of the less than glowing reviews here. Yes, the prose is sparse. Yes, our author doesn't seem to talk very much about himself. Yes, Tom Bissell's review in the NYT is ridiculously encomiastic...."a novelist's sense of character"...??? I wonder what particular novelist Mr. Bissell had in mind. But to counter these criticisms, I would offer two pointed rejoinders.
1) Stewart makes clear that the Emperor Babur's account is the model for his own. Indeed, passages from Babur make up a great part of the book. Readers seemed to have skimmed the passage on p.11 of my copy about Babur:
"At times it seems the only thing missing from the story is himself. He never explains what drives him to live this extraordinary life and take these kinds of risks. He does not describe his emotions, and as a result can seem distant and the episodes of his life, repetitive. Confronted by dead bodies or people trying to kill him, he writes in increasingly dispassionate and impersonal prose. But this restraint only emphasizes the extraordinary nature of his experiences."
Rory has followed Babur's formula to the letter.
2) I can not help but notice how much a sort of class envy hangs over these critical reviews: "bratty", "Eton boy", "super privileged" are just some of the adjectives applied to Mr. Stewart. I would submit to these reviewers that they come across as more than a little ill-natured and absurd. If you have taken the sorts of risks with your life as Rory does here, if you have suffered from dysentery and managed to keep walking through sub-zero weather day upon day, then let fly with the slings and arrows of your resentment. If not, pray don't expose yourself as an armchair yob with a twelve tonne chip on your shoulder.
I don't myself know why Rory took this journey. He doesn't seem to know either. I don't know why he adopted a dog whose teeth had been knocked out by villagers to accompany him, naming him Babur after the emperor. It may well be that he's completely mad. If so, we could do with a little more madness in the world. The book and its author have their flaws, but a lack of intrepidity or kindness, to animals and men, are not among them. Good job, Rory. I'm glad you made it through.
Book Review: Somewhere in Afghanistan, the Point Got Lost
Summary: 2 Stars
It's an odd sensation in a travel book to be guided by a traveler who remains, for 300 pages, a cipher. Stewart reveals virtually nothing about himself or about his motive for undertaking his dangerous, difficult, and (evidently) unrewarding journey--on foot, no less. In fact, there's something distinctly bratty about Stewart's approach to the whole endeavor: he made the trip because he "wanted to," he repeats, and one can almost hear him stamping his foot; his evident lack of any need to support himself for years at a time (he has bundles of cash at his disposal and, at the end of the journey to Afghanistan, returns to "his room" in his parents' house in Scotland) and his conviction that he should be fed and housed by strangers all the way across Afghanistan (but not accompanied or told where to go) have a distinctly elitist and slightly juvenile ring to them, which is not completely surprising given Stewart's parentage and social status (read his Wikipedia biography to get a hint of the manor to which he was born). The people that he meets, meanwhile, are with few exceptions entirely dreadful--dull when they are not outright dangerous, rude when they are not simply miserable, malicious and sadistic when they are not merely indifferent. Nor are the villages he visits anything to write home about, each one essentially identical to another in its revolting, raw-sewage-and-war-debris sameness. The landscape--which Stewart frequently cannot see because he is walking through blinding snowstorms--gets even shorter shrift, and Stewart only occasionally remembers to describe the quality of light at sunset or the shape of a mountain range. Indeed, one gathers that all of that was wholly secondary; his goal was the destination (Kabul), never the journey. (And that's perhaps no surprise, given how ghastly Afghanistan appears in Stewart's version.) The inclusion, meanwhile, of the numerous grade-school-quality sketches that Stewart inked into his journal is a blunder that undermines what little seriousness the book can lay claim to. Stewart hints occasionally that he's bedeviled by unhappy memories or regrets as he walks, but that's as close as he lets anyone come to a glimpse of what's taking place inside his head or of what his reactions are to most of the things that happen to him. That's a fatal flaw in a book that has so little else to offer the reader. If the Afghans are essentially unknowable and alien, if the places are unremarkable and monotonous, and if the narrator slowly disappear as he writes, the whole edifice of the project crumbles. Stewart's only tears in the book are for an animal and never for the human misery he traipses through, as much proof as anyone should surely need that he is (or was) a callow, overprivileged youth on walkabout and that _The Places In Between_ got published through high-society connections and not because Stewart had anything particularly meaningful to say. In a country as barren and forbidding as Afghanistan, the places in between are largely voids, and it is a void that Stewart's book most faithfully transmits.