Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Nov 2011
368 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
When veteran reporter Fariba Nawa returned home to Afghanistan - the nation she had fled as a child with her family during the Soviet invasion nearly twenty years earlier - she discovered a fractured country transformed by a multibillion-dollar drug trade. In Opium Nation, Nawa deftly illuminates the changes that have overtaken Afghanistan after decades of unbroken war. Sharing remarkable stories of poppy farmers, corrupt officials, expats, drug lords, and addicts, including her haunting encounter with a twelve-year-old child bride who was bartered to pay off her father's opium debts, Nawa offers a revealing and provocative narrative of a homecoming more difficult than she ever imagined as she courageously explores her own Afghan American identity and unveils a startling portrait of a land in turmoil.
"Powerful... Nawa draws rich, complex portraits of subjects on both sides of the law... She writes with passion about the history of her volatile homeland and with cautious optimism about its future." - Publishers Weekly
"Nawa ably captures the tragic complexity of Afghan society and the sheer difficulty of life there... Her assured narrative clearly stems from in-depth reporting in a risk-laden environment." - Kirkus Reviews
"Opium Nation brings much needed depth and complexity to any conversation involving Afghanistan and its future. Fariba Nawa writes with the detailed eye of a journalist, the warmth of a proud Afghan and the nuanced perspective of someone effortlessly straddling the East and the West." - Firoozeh Dumas, author of Laughing Without an Accent and Funny in Farsi
"Insightful and informative... Fariba Nawa weaves her personal story of reconnecting with her homeland after 9/11 with a very engaging narrative that chronicles Afghanistan's dangerous descent into opium trafficking... [and] how the drug trade has damaged the lives of ordinary Afghan people." - Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns
This information about Opium Nation was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fariba Nawa has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, the Sunday Times Magazine (London), Newsday, and the Village Voice. She has been a guest on CBS's 48 Hours as well as numerous other television and radio shows on NPR, the BBC, MTV, and NBC. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters. For more information, visit her website at www.faribanawa.com.
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