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Summary: Thanks to all reviewers
Review: A thanks to all who took the time to review this book. Based on these reviews I bought and read this most wonderful, important book.
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Summary: The Kite Runner
Review: I just finished this wonderfull book and hope lots of people read it. It is surly worth the time. I feel that this book gave me an understanding about a people I really don't know much about. I have heard about some of the tragic things that have and continue to take place in Afganistan but this book helped me see how similar people are no matter what their religion or culture. This is a story about love. About wanting love and acceptance and about the giving of love and forgiveness. I highly recommend this book.
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Summary: Extraordinary!
Review: Amir, the son of a wealthy Pashtun businessman in Kabul, Afghanistan, spends the happiest days of his childhood in deep friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant who is a Hazara (an Afghan ethnic minority). Not all goes well with this friendship, however, and as the story progresses, the difficulties of maintaining that friendship have a lasting effect on both Amir's and Hassan's family.There is something about this story that makes all the characters ring true...as if they are real characters who just stepped into this novel. The story is quite captivating and, at times, gave me chills and brought me to tears. I thought I could anticipate what would happen, but each time I was surprised. What resulted was more like the experience of reading a real person's biography than of reading a novel. In addition to the story of a unique friendship, the novel explores class differences, father-son relationships, Afghani culture, modern Afghani history, and introduces terms of the language spoken in Afghanistan). This is a rich debut novel not to be missed!
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Summary: An extraordinary and exceptional novel
Review: The Kite Runner is one of the best books I have read in my lifetime. Dr. Hosseini has created a masterpiece of words filled with profound characters and highly evocative descriptions of their inner thoughts, emotions, and personal experiences. This story literally made me cry on several occasions. One of the most exceptional aspects of The Kite Runner is its poignant delineation of perseverence of the human spirit. Dr. Hosseini is a gifted storyteller and writer.
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Summary: 41 people before me can't be wrong...
Review: Now I have NEVER cried while reading a book before, but for much of the time I read this elegant novel I was in tears. The characters are sketched well, the relationships believable. I just could not believe this was a first novel. The only question is Doc, how are you going to top this excellent first novel? I sure hope you try...
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Summary: I haven't cried while reading a book in a long time
Review: I began reading this book because an ex-student who has become a dear friend over the years left it on my doorstep with a note that said, " you must read this." The young woman was born in Afghanistan but is very much a child of the world and I knew it had to be special for her to be so emotional about it. As I plowed through the first fourteen chapters I did so out of my concern for her feelings as the book seemed shallow and not that well written. But from the fourteenth chapter on I was mesmerized by the flow and the beauty of the words and the intensely powerful emotions it evoked in me. I have not cried while reading a book in a long time, but this book reaches down to the deepest of human feelings; that terrible knowledge that such ugliness can exist amid the beauty of the human condition.
This is an important book and its' so immediate message needs to be heard by all.
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Summary: A review of The Kite Runner by G.A. Zikria M.D.
Review: The Kite Runner is a remarkable feat of storytelling with an intricate plot woven like the finest of Afghan carpets. Beautifully written in a unique language that brings the intangible nuances of Eastern thought and feelings to the Western reader. If not the great American novel, The Kite Runner most definitely epitomizes the experience of a new segment of immigrants in the saga of the Great American experiment. The story takes place during a sad and bleak period of Afghanistan's recent history. An experience, that was no less heinous and horrific than the Holocaust. Over two decades of human suffering and misery, tragically inflicted by humans on their fellow brethren. During times like these we are inspired by the beauty and strength of the human spirit and at the same time disgusted by its ugliness, selfishness and cruelty. The Kite Runner is the story of Hassan, a servant boy and Amir the master's son whose bond of friendship is a unique one, the intricacies and depth of which is determined by social values and personal integrity. The author's depiction of prewar and postwar Taliban Afghanistan stand in stark contrast to one another. War's legacy is the devastation of the country's landscape, and anomie resulting from its society's decay and destruction. In the midst of this existential darkness and gloom a shimmering ray of hope shines to lend the clouds their silver lining. Hope stemming from an act of decency, from striving for faith, spirituality and redemption, which in the author's own words, is " the transformation of guilt into a positive outcome".
Bravo and congratulations Dr. Hossieni for capturing the human condition so poignantly in your first endeavor in the novel genre.
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Summary: There is a way to be good again
Review: Just finished this book, and absolutley loved it,( I happen to be a professional book worm). I happened to meet the author and found him a very nice guy, he is an Afghan Physician living in San Francisco. This book in a way is the story of his life, though all the settings and characters are fictional, and may be the lives of all of us who left our land , watan behind, in the time of turmoil.
We all saw our defensless land being raped and tortured by it's own people there was nothing that we could do.
Dr. Hosseini is a genius in drawing the characters , there is no angles or evils in his book, people are all human that do good and bad things at the times.
He draws a very percise picture of Afghan exile community in Fremont and Hayward in Northern California, and I have to admit it has a painfull resemblance to the Iranian Community in U.S. The general who lives on welfare, the Doctor who ran a hot dog stand and so on......
It also points the double standards of a traditional society, their approach to their girls and boys. A man is free to explore the life, but a woman's chasity is all a family got, nang va namoos as he calls it. I am astonished that this issue is being brought up by a man!! The society where there are things much more important than the TRUTH
He goes back to Afghanistan being raped by Taliban in search of .........
And guess who he finds the head of a Taliban unit, the former bully in his old neighbor, who happened to be rapist and in love with Hitler, now operates massacars in the name of god!!!( Sounds familiar to you in Iran??)
An Afghanistan full of Children with no childhood... No the book is not a lament on what it used to be, it is the story of life, the way it is, and the way it will be, the reality of life. And at the end we will figure out that , May be There is a way to be good again.
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Summary: No word to describe this book....
Review: This is the best book I have ever read in my entire life. What more can I say? I am an avid reader with a lifetime of "average" books to base my opinion on. All I can say is that it puts every other book you have ever read to shame. Believe all the reviews.... they're true! Beautifully written. Perfect in every way. I will be reading this book again. Read this book..... the story will stay with you forever.
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Summary: A great read and a literary gem
Review: The "Kite Runner" caught my eye because I was in Afghanistan with CARE when the Russian involvement was biginning to build towards its disatrous climax and the social fabric was coming unglued. Hosseini's evocation of the sights, sounds and smells of Kabul, which is central to his story, comes alive through his simple yet elegant use of language. It is a part of why his book rises to the level of fine literature.
We are accustomed to stories about the assimilation of Americans of European origin into life in the United States. Few of us could have imagined this story being retold about an immigrant from an area so remote geographically and culturally. Any reader with the dimmest memory of immigrant ancestors will be deeply touched by this current version of the universal American Experience.
Read the "Kite Runner" and learn more about Afghanistan's catastrophe than you would from a shelf full of history books.
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