Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini This is an absolutely harrowing novel about one woman, Mariam, then another, Laila, suffering in male-dominated and Islam-dominated Afghanistan from the 1970s to the 2000s. They face near-constant abuse and cruelty from beginning to end. This is one of those stories where, just when you think things can't get any worse, things get MUCH worse. I found myself saying, "Oh, please, no," many times through this book. The nightmare of the lives of Mariam and Laila takes place while Afghanistan goes through a number of upheavals. I’m no historian, but these include a president overthrown, a dictatorship, a Communist puppet-state of the USSR, a civil war against the Soviets, more civil war as the victorious mujahedeen (sp?) lead factions against each other, the brutal rule of the fundamentalist Taliban, the post-9/11 attack of the US against the largely-innocent population, and the comparative freedom afterward. Not su