Memoirs: Afghanistan - Armenia - Bosnia

"After living for three months with the Kabul bookseller Sultan Khan in the spring of 2002, Norwegian journalist Seierstad penned this astounding portrait of a nation recovering from war, undergoing political flux and mired in misogyny and poverty." (Publishers Weekly)

"Latifa was only 16 when the Taliban overran Kabul, changing her life dramatically. On the morning of September 26, 1996--the day the Taliban took Kabul--Latifa, her sister, Soraya, and their father drove to Aryana Square and saw the body of the murdered former president, Najibullah." (Booklist)

"The Story of My Life,' [is] in a certain sense, the world's most literate reality show." (Los Angeles Times)

"Born in England and raised on her father's fantastic stories of an Afghanistan she had never known, Shah spends her adult life searching for a mythic place of beauty. "Any Western adult might have told me that this was an exile's tale of a lost Eden: the place you dream about, to which you can never return. But even then, I wasn't going to accept that." What she finds is a place ravaged by decades of war, poverty and, later, religious puritanism." (Publishers Weekly)

"Ansary fired off an email on September 12 that found its way to millions of readers around the world (including FSG editorial). The e-mail, printed here in an appendix, included such comments as "When you think `Taliban,' think `Nazis.' When you think `Bin Laden,' think `Hitler.' And when you think `the people of Afghanistan,' think `the Jews in the concentration camps.' " Ansary, the son of a Pashtun Afghan father and Finnish-American mother, lived as a Muslim outside of Kabul until the early '60s, when he left on scholarship to attend an American high school, eventually going on to college and becoming an educational writer." (Publishers Weekly)

"On the night of April 24, 1915, Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest, and more than two hundred other Armenian politicians and intellectuals were arrested in Constantinople. Soon, Armenians across Turkey were massacred or forced to join a death march to the desert of Der Zor. Balakian walked among the displaced for months before he fled, disguising himself variously as a German engineer, a soldier, and a worker in the vineyards; he began this book while in hiding. (It was published in Armenian in 1922 and in 1959; the translator is Balakian’s great-nephew.) Both a memoir and an attempt at a history of the genocide, it assumes considerable familiarity with Ottoman politics, but remains fascinating first-hand testimony to a monumental crime." - From The New Yorker, 2008

"[T]his is a powerful book, which shows how difficult it is to make peace after such a conflict, not least peace among neighbors." (Financial Times)

"Ten-year-old Croatian Filipovic's graphic, firsthand account of life in embattled Sarajevo." (Publishers Weekly)