This travel narrative, focusing on the remote region of Afghanistan called Nuristan, has a wonderful back-story. Bealby had been a bright, but book-hating English youth with a serious reading disability. But his girlfriend was an avid reader, and when she gave him a copy of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King , he forced himself to read it. The story appealed to him, and eventually he became both an adventurous traveler and a published writer. His girlfriend came to a sudden accidental death on one of their trips. Later, still grieving, he found himself watching the wonderful John Huston film of Kipling’s story. He vowed to undertake a journey paralleling that of the fictional Peachy Carnahan and Danny Dravot, to the remote land of “Kafiristan”, beyond the Hindu Kush. This of course, is a perfectly real place, the long, narrow prong of Afghan territory that kept Pakistan from bordering the former Soviet Union. Bealby’s adventure took place in the 1990’s, the Pakistan of the smoldering border war with India, and the Afghanistan of the Taliban. He had little apparent interest in politics. What comes across in this book is his ability to make himself at home among strangers, and to instantly grasp the human element in a place that is foreign to him. My friend Filip, in Prague, is rather like him in this. I would gladly travel anywhere with such a person.
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