The Afghan Amulet: Travels from the Hindu Kush to Razgrad

Rating:
Summary: The best travel book I ever read!
Review: Ms Paine is a thoughtful and even heroic travel writer. As a woman of 60 traveling alone through some of the parts of the world hostile to women (e.g. Pakistan, Iran) somehow she manages to report with deep understanding and delicate humor. A great read.

Rating:
Summary: A Meandering Muddle
Review: This meandering travelogue is theoretically framed by the author's quest to discover the provenance of a particular style of embroidered amulet, but doesn't really hold together well. Paine is a multi-lingual expert on embroidery who recounts her fours trips, encompassing regions in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and finally Bulgaria, in her attempt to track down the source of the amulet. While she is decent in giving local color and impression, she is awful at conveying the progress of her quest. When she does manage to talk to someone who knows something, the conversation is presented as a series of incomprehensible non-sequiturs. It's best to skim over anything about the textiles, for what is more interesting is her experience as a 62-year old English woman traveling solo through some rather dicey areas at the time of the Gulf War and the new independence of Afghanistan (which is the only country where she is assaulted).