An Afghanistan Picture Show Or How I Saved the World

In 1982 William T. Vollmann, one of our most versatile talents, traveled to see the war in Afghanistan. In An Afghanistan Picture Show, his first book-length work of non-fiction, Vollmann paints a brutally honest and dryly comic portrait of a young American coming to terms with his political naivete. It is the story of a would-be giver who finds himself a perpetual Stranger, unable to comprehend the simplest things he hears and sees, and continually compelled to rely on others for help. In two narrative perspectives, Vollmann wryly confronts his own inadequacy in the face of limitless suffering and comes to the realization that one who went to aid and to understand could only hope, trust, and receive. In An Afghanistan Picture Show Vollmann describes a Cold War world of spies and lurking strangeness, a world in which his younger self asks unanswerable questions of orphans, refugees, guerrilla leaders, bureaucrats, corrupt officials, and prescient has-been politicians. He tells of...

Author: Vollmann William T.
ISBN: 9781612191997
Year of publication: 2013
Genre: Modern prose, Publicism
Number of pages: 266
Reading time: 4 h. 26 min.
Formats: FB2, EPUB, PDF
Language: english
Requests: read online, download without registration, e-book