| This book is a morality play, and it does delve into many deep and significant issues: loyalty, courage, honor, good and evil, guilt, redemption, cultural values, 'n' more. But there's too much black and white; the good characters (and their children, wives, and friends) are very, very good, and the bad ones (all the Taliban guys, mainly, and one in particular) are extremely bad. Really, the narrator is pretty bad, until…. It's a good story, and interesting because it's set in Afghanistan and covers a span of time from before the Russians (bad) upset the old ways (good) until after the Taliban (much worse even than the Russians) were overthrown by the Northern Alliance after September 2002. Human nature is shown to be pretty much the same there as elsewhere (stoic loyalty in some, love of killing in others), but we learn that there was more of a culture there than we knew. |