Book Review: Kabul Beauty School

Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez

Summary: Deborah Rodriguez uses her cosmetology degree and experience to help open and run the Kabul Beauty School, where she seeks to empower Afghan women by teaching them the skills to open their own beauty salons and serve as future teachers at the school. She learns and shares the stories of these remarkable women and accomplishes her own self-discovery in the process.

What I liked and what I learned: The author’s work in Afghanistan and her service to the women she taught is admirable and showed real courage. She presents a more human Afghanistan–physically and culturally–than we often have the opportunity to see in the news and security-related stories. Much of her book takes place before I started to pay attention to Afghanistan at all and before the security situation deteriorated drastically after 2007, and provided a glimpse of how ordinary Afghans and foreigners lived day-to-day.

I learned a lot about women in Afghanistan, how their roles and opportunities changed as Afghan leadership and security shifted over time. Deborah does a fantastic job of sharing these women’s stories–their burdens and their successes alike–and how they navigate personal empowerment within cultural constraints. I found myself continually reflecting upon the true freedom American women are afforded and the blessings I have in my own life in terms of personal freedom, education, and a loving, supportive marriage.

What I didn’t like: The first chapter of the books seems like it was written to hook the reader and sort of draw you in with a dramatic story, but it actually had the opposite effect on me. I found it a little overly dramatic, I was displeased with the dishonesty displayed, and I rapidly (and perhaps unfairly) decided I didn’t like the author. I almost stopped reading. Additionally, I found the follow-up to this first chapter a little disjointed and buried in a later chapter. I  expected it to be tied up neatly at the end, but it felt like it was just sort of stuck in there because it had to be. I also had some difficulties reading the story because the author and I disagree on some major moral issues – dishonesty and polygamy in particular.

My rating: Ultimately, I’m glad I decided to give the book a chance after the first chapter. It’s worth a read, but hardly blows me away. My rating: 3 stars out of 5.

WAIT – Is someone shooting cows???

seneca

We went to Seneca Rocks, WV this weekend to go rock climbing (which was awesome!), so there was no time for writing. I did read a bit, though, and finished up Kabul Beauty School (review forthcoming). At one point, the author, Deborah Rodriguez, shares directions to her house, out of which she ran her beauty school:

Go to the Internet café near the rotary in Shar-e-Now, the one near the emergency hospital with the red and white paint on the wall. Take a right, and you’ll then be on the main street in Shar-e-Now. Before you get to the bombed-out movie theater you’ll see a bright yellow building. Turn right there, then drive past the street with all the dead cows. Continue past the old warlord house, then go left at the next street. You will see a blue-and-white-striped box and a sign that says ASSA in black letters. Just ahead, there’s a gray building with a lot of Afghan men hanging out in front, a tailor shop, a compound with a blue gate, and a hand-pump well on the corner. My guesthouse is the one with the blue gate (177).

For some reason, I was reminded of the Kabul directions the next day when Adam read aloud the guide book’s directions to our climb:

About 150 feet uphill (north) of the edge of the Southeast Corner is a long, vegetated, low-angled ramp. Climb the right-leaning ramp in two easy pitches, until Lower Broadway Ledge is reached at a point below UP AND COMING (200 ft). (168)

I can tell you that in that moment, they seemed a lot more similar to me than they do now as I write them out – there are no bombed-out buildings, dead cows, or warlords in the wilderness of West Virginia. In all seriousness, though, I think what really struck me was how incomprehensible both sets of directions are. Kabul and Seneca are “wild” in completely different ways. In Kabul, it’s because the city was underdeveloped and none of the streets were named, at least at the time. Unfortunately, things aren’t likely to get a whole lot better for Afghanistan anytime soon. At Seneca, there is barely any development because it’s still wilderness. Thankfully, I have Adam to translate the guidebook and we happily found our climb. It isn’t easy, though, if you don’t know where you’re looking. I was thinking about how to fix this difficulty because I always want to fix things… and I came up with the ridiculous and impossible idea of posting a little sign at the base of each climb with its name and difficulty rating (so CONVENIENT, right?) Convenient, yes. Wild, no. Part of the draw of climbing for me is, most basically, the physical act of climbing and the puzzle of figuring out the route. But I can do that in a gym, and I don’t. One of my favorite parts of climbing, really, is being out on the rock: the feel of real rock under my hands, the wind and sun on my face, the view from up high on the rocks. We saw a turkey vulture fly by below us this weekend and talked about how rare and awesome that is to experience, particularly on the east coast. I really don’t want to make climbing more “convenient” because that would make it less “wild.” I want my rocks as wild as they can be while still being climbable.

Oh, PS – Regarding the title of this post: There are plenty of LIVE cows at Seneca. Every once in a while on the rock you hear a loud “moooooo.” Also, there are hunters in the area so sometimes there are gunshots as well. I have to say it crossed our minds: WAIT – IS SOMEONE SHOOTING COWS???

Amazon’s 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime

So I’m a little late to this party–Amazon published this list in early 2014–but I just heard about it recently (that fits, right?). Anyways, it’s not a particularly inspiring list as far as I’m concerned. Amazon’s editorial team compiled it through “taxing months of deliberation,” basically picking books they liked. It does, though, offer a nice range of books and gives me some idea of books I may want to think about reading. That, and dredges up memories (good and bad) of high school English class. I don’t know what list I was looking at the first time I counted, or maybe it was just past my bedtime, because I determined that I had read 26 of these…No. I’ve read 18. But I still consider that pretty good.

Here’s the list, with the ones I’ve read bolded and starred, sometimes with a comment. Note that I only star the books I’m sure I’ve read. Look through the list and let me know what you’ve read from the list!

  1. 1984 by George Orwell
  2. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
  3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
  4. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
  5. A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition by Lemony Snicket
  6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
  7. Alice Munro: Selected Stories by Alice Munro
  8. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  9. All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
  10. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt***
  11. Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume
  12. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  13. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  14. Born To Run – A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
  15. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
  16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl***
  18. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
  19. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
  20. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown
  21. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1 by Jeff Kinney
  22. Dune by Frank Herbert
  23. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  24. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
  25. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
  26. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown*** (Has anyone NOT read this? a million times?)
  27. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  28. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
  29. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
  30. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote*** (This was the first book to actually terrify me. I slept with the lights on while I was reading it.)
  31. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
  32. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  33. Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
  34. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
  35. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
  36. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder*** (I read the whole series, starting in 2nd grade. I decided I was going to be President when I grew up and return the whole country to covered wagon times. HA!)
  37. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  38. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  39. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
  40. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl***
  41. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
  42. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  43. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
  44. Moneyball by Michael Lewis
  45. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
  46. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  47. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
  48. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
  49. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
  50. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen***
  51. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
  52. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  53. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
  54. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
  55. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
  56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
  57. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  58. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  59. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger*** (I unconvincingly played the prostitute in my 11th grade class’s movie about all the books we read that year; I did not, however, wear a green dress, which was silly of us…)
  60. The Color of Water by James McBride
  61. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  62. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson*** (Disturbing. BUT I learned a lot, including about the invention of the Ferris Wheel!)
  63. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
  64. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  65. The Giver by Lois Lowry***
  66. The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
  67. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*** (I really, really disliked this book. As a result, I will not see the movie.)
  68. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  69. The House At Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
  70. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  71. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot*** (I read this earlier this year – VERY interesting discussion of where the cells for so much of our medical advancements came from)
  72. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
  73. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) by Rick Riordan
  74. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  75. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
  76. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
  77. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien***
  78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks***
  79. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
  80. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
  81. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
  82. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
  83. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
  84. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  85. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
  86. The Shining by Stephen King
  87. The Stranger by Albert Camus***
  88. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  89. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
  90. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
  91. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
  92. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
  93. The World According to Garp by John Irving
  94. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  95. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe***
  96. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee***
  97. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
  98. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann***
  99. Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
  100. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak