I truly enjoyed this book,

even though its writing was rather subpar and the characters were ones that I simply couldn't bring myself to like.

This might seem rather strange at first glance, but it was actually quite fascinating to read about Afghanistan (albeit in a fictionalized form) during the late 1940s as described by a writer in the early 1960s.

Michener had an incredibly vast knowledge of Afghanistan, having made numerous trips there before penning this book, and this knowledge is truly evident in his vivid and detailed descriptions.

The way he portrays the landscapes, the culture, and the people gives the reader a unique and immersive experience,

allowing us to catch a glimpse of a time and place that might otherwise be unknown to us.

Despite its flaws, this book offers a valuable perspective on Afghanistan and is well worth the read.

After World War II, Afghanistan presented an alluring picture. The landscapes were vast and beautiful, with mountains rising majestically and plains stretching as far as the eye could see. The cities were filled with a unique blend of cultures, with ancient traditions coexisting with modern influences. However, it seems that not much has changed since then. The country has endured decades of conflict and instability, which have taken a toll on its people and its infrastructure.

The plot of this description meanders, leaving the reader unsure whether it is meant to be a romantic adventure or a deep inspection of cultural identity. The characters' motivations are ambiguous, and it is difficult to understand what drives them. This ambiguity adds an element of mystery to the story, but it also makes it challenging for the reader to fully engage with the characters and their experiences.

Despite these uncertainties, the allure of Afghanistan remains. Its rich history, diverse cultures, and stunning landscapes continue to吸引 visitors from around the world. Whether one is seeking a romantic adventure or a deeper understanding of cultural identity, Afghanistan has something to offer. However, it is important to approach the country with an open mind and a willingness to learn, as its complex and often troubled past has shaped its present and future.

See my review on my book blog:

http://quirkyreader.livejournal.com/1...

This short statement simply directs readers to a specific book review on a particular blog. The blog is called "quirkyreader" and the review can be found at the provided link. However, it doesn't provide any details about the book being reviewed or the nature of the review itself. It would be great to expand on this and give some insights into what the book is about, what aspects of it were liked or disliked, and any overall impressions. This would make the review more engaging and useful for potential readers of the book. By adding more content, the blog post could attract more traffic and provide valuable information to its audience.

Maybe the reviewer could start by giving a brief summary of the book's plot, followed by their personal thoughts and feelings. They could also include some quotes from the book to illustrate their points. Additionally, it would be beneficial to compare the book to other similar works in the genre and discuss what makes it unique. With these expansions, the review would become a more comprehensive and interesting read.

I purchased this book after being enamored with Michener's Hawaii, eagerly anticipating a reading experience of similar splendor. However, I was met with disappointment. At best, I can say that I gleaned some knowledge. The book transports you around Afghanistan in the 1940s, presenting a diverse range of places and cultures and incorporating relevant historical details. That's the sole reason it earns 2 stars, despite being otherwise abysmal.

This book is plagued by the dual issues of an uninspiring, meandering plot and a narrator who is among the most unlikable characters I've come across in a long time. Firstly, the plot. The book is promoted as a story about a diplomat (Mark) in search of an American girl (Ellen) who married an Afghan and then vanished. But the initial 100 pages of the 400-page tome are entirely dedicated to the mundane diplomatic life in Kabul (lacking even the slightest hint of conflict to engage readers), and we're well past the halfway mark before Mark bothers to inquire with Ellen's husband about her whereabouts—despite everyone knowing the husband's location all along and him having nothing to hide! A plot that primarily serves as a pretext to explore a setting can be effective, but in a novel, descriptions of the geography and culture cannot simply substitute for interesting events and dialogue.

Moreover, all the characters seem to conspire to hinder plot progression. Before actually dispatching someone to search for Ellen or even communicate with her husband, the U.S. government interviews all of her former boyfriends and roommates in an attempt to determine "what was wrong with her" that led her to marry an Afghan in the first place, and there is much solemn discussion about whether Ellen's hometown was objectively a bad place. (If Michener had intended to satirize this investigation, it might have been clever, but unfortunately, he appears to be completely serious, resulting in some unintended comedy.) If real-life missing-persons investigations are conducted in this manner, I'm amazed that anyone is ever located.

Then there's Mark. He's a jerk. For example, he posits that Ellen chose her unconventional lifestyle because she is unable to have children, resulting in—wait for it—"a barrenness of spirit." I haven't even touched on his creepy relationship with the Nazi refugee Stiglitz, a prime illustration of character relationships that make no sense. Mark is Jewish (and prides himself on having "table manners" despite that fact, as if Judaism and etiquette were mutually exclusive), and he vacillates between desiring Stiglitz's death for the atrocities he committed and wanting to be his friend. I can't fathom why, since Stiglitz—like Mark and most of the other characters—is thoroughly unappealing and unsympathetic. Oh, and it's worth noting that Mark has random, plot-irrelevant dalliances with most of the female characters in the book. Give me a break.

Ultimately, this book was a massive disappointment. It read like a travelogue—dull, with little plot or conflict and uninteresting characters. It felt incredibly outdated (I suppose I should have surmised that from the plot summary: after all, it's a book about a white man traversing an Eastern country, getting "closer to earth," and attempting to "rescue" an American woman he has no reason to believe is even in danger). Regrettably, after reading Caravans, I will approach Michener books with caution in the future. For those seeking to learn about Afghanistan through enjoyable fiction, I would recommend Khaled Hosseini's works instead.

This is the first book I read for my 1963 reading list. It held the #4 position on the bestseller list for that year. With under 500 pages, it is relatively short for a Michener book.

The setting is Afghanistan in 1946. I would wager that the country didn't feature prominently in the news in the year following the end of WWII, despite it being a time of anxiety regarding the USSR and the spread of communism. In the story, though, the anxiety at the US Embassy in Kabul revolves around an American young woman who married an Afghan man she met in college and returned with him to his country.

When the story commences, Ellen Jasper's parents back in Pennsylvania haven't heard from their daughter in a while and have contacted their senator, asking him to施压 on the Embassy to look into her whereabouts and well-being.

Mark Miller, a descendant of Jewish immigrants to the US from Germany in the mid-19th century, is currently posted in Kabul as a junior-grade State Dept officer. Since he speaks the language, the task of finding Ellen is assigned to him. Why mention that he is Jewish? It figures into the story in an interesting manner.

The novel offers a wonderful introduction to this country in the days when, as they were prone to say at the Embassy, "Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus." In fact, the Mullahs rule the society, and Miller witnesses two incidents of stoning; one of a female adulterer and one of a male homosexual. But there are also young men who desire to bring the country into modern times, both socially and technologically. Ellen's husband is one of those men.

As Miller sets off in pursuit of the missing woman, Michener takes the reader on a journey through the mountains and deserts of that inhospitable land. According to his Author's Note, he himself spent time traveling in Afghanistan before penning the book. Plenty of adventure unfolds, during which he provides a comprehensive introduction to the lives, issues, and customs of the era. Of course, there is also romance and some rather racy scenes for a Michener book.

I was somewhat amused by Michener's portrayal of the Ellen Jasper character. Miller does locate her. She is fearless, wild, and completely at odds with wars, progress, and the American imperialist agenda. She goes through men as if it were the free love era of the 1960s. Michener was no fan of hippies, protesters, or any anti-American sentiments. Indeed, he was a complete patriot. So, he approaches this character with a combination of psychological interpretation and condescension. However, Mark Miller falls for her hard.

I can understand how the book became a bestseller in 1963!

Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus.

The Fall of Kabul this past week is truly too distressing for words. As raw footage from the field made its way to social media, it broke hearts at a pace much faster than decades before. To help make sense of this barrage of emotional and heartbreaking images and videos, I thought of turning to this old book which belonged to my dad. It's so old that the dust seems impossible to remove from the cover!

CARAVANS is the semi-autobiographical story of an American diplomat assigned to track down a missing American girl who married an Afghan immediately after World War II. The plot itself may not be outstanding, and I personally found little about the American girl that was worth the trouble so many noble men took to find her. However, this is one book you read to be transported and besotted by the incredible descriptions of its people and landscapes! I did not expect that at all!

"You have the disease that eats at our world. You cannot find peace in old conventions and beliefs, yet you are not sufficiently committed to anything to forge new ones for yourself."

Michener writes about Afghanistan as one who has camped in its deserts, travelled amongst its people in caravans, and witnessed the most horrific public executions by stoning and beheading-by-bayonet. And he truly has.

I came to this book seeking an overview, hoping to get a sense of the people through their history. I did not expect to read a love poem to its deserts and dead cities, crumbling monuments that were ancient in the time of past great conquerors like Darius and Alexander. This is a country of past greatness, a harsh land that explains its harsh laws and people. Michener writes respectfully of two kinds of educated Afghans: one who seeks a rebirth of his country by learning from the engineering of the Germans, the weapons of the Russians, and trade from the Americans and British; the other Afghan seeking a renewal in the form of enlightened mullahs (religious authorities in the villages, both ruler and judge).

The patriotic pride comes in the Afghans considering themselves descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and Hitler supported the twisted claim to their being "founders" of the Aryan race. Michener, of course, points out this irony.

If geography is destiny, then this explains all the focus on Kabul, "the most remote of capitals," "perched at the intersection of caravan trails that had functioned for more than three thousand years." Michener said it is a cauldron, a place to test one's manhood. And yet, for all the trials and tribulations he faced there, he wrote that this was the one place he would love to re-visit. And this is one book that is well worth re-reading!

For a historical overview of Aghanistan's past, check out this 2017 NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/wo...

Definitely one of the lesser James Michener novels, "Caravans" tells the story of an American embassy worker in Kabul in 1946. He goes on a search for a missing American girl who has run off with an Afghani.

The book is vaguely interesting for its descriptions of an Afghanistan mostly untouched by Western influences. However, there is little else to recommend it. You're not likely to remember any of the characters. There is exactly one gripping scene, when the protagonist witnesses an adulterous woman being stoned to death by a mob in Kandahar. Also, the book has a fairly nuanced treatment of the Islamic mullahs, who are portrayed as the progressive element in Afghan culture - very unlike most modern depictions of the Taliban.

It's funny to think that Michener was considered shockingly liberal by the standards of the 1950s. His books are completely retrograde by today's standards. Literary qualities aside, Michener's novels, particularly the early ones, serve as a very interesting signpost in the development of Western thought over the past seventy-five years.

Moving on, one of the most interesting books Michener wrote was "The Drifters", which is about the emerging hippie and anti-war subculture in 1968 America and Europe. It's not a great book, but it is rather unique as a picture of the 1960s youth culture from the perspective of a member of the WASP Establishment.

Post-Boomer generations in the West have grown up with the cultural consensus first expressed by the 1960s youth culture and then the subsequent rights movements. Reading Michener's books can help us realize that once upon a time, such cultural events would have been considered not just wrong, but totally unthinkable.

That's a lot to take out of middlebrow novels like "Caravans", but since the plot and characterization is so thin, you might as well focus on their place in recent history rather than their actual literary quality.

James Michener was truly an extraordinary individual. He was not only an intrepid adventurer who fearlessly explored far-flung places, but also a brilliant scholar with a deep understanding of various cultures and a prolific author who produced numerous captivating works. Sadly, we are unlikely to see the likes of him again.

Before writing this novel, he traveled extensively in Afghanistan. I can't imagine the physical discomfort he must have endured during those travels, but it undoubtedly added an element of authenticity to the story that I greatly appreciated.

This book, which is only about 340 pages long - a mere novella by Michener's standards - is set in 1946. Mark Miller is dispatched on a diplomatic mission to locate Ellen Jaspar, an American woman who married an Afghan man and then vanished. Miller's journey takes him to the most remote corners of Afghanistan's deserts and mountains. He experiences extreme heat (a scorching 130 degrees!!) and bitter cold. He witnesses appalling acts of barbarity, but also encounters great warmth and hospitality. Through it all, he begins to gain a glimmer of understanding into the complex Afghan mind and culture.

In the early part of the book, the plot and character development are sacrificed to some extent in the interest of educating the reader. However, I believe it was a more than fair trade-off for the wealth of knowledge I gained about Afghan culture, history, and terrain. As the story progresses, Michener steps out of the teacher role and allows the narrative to flow smoothly without interruption, which I found to be the more exciting part of the book. But overall, every aspect of it was fascinating to me.

Here are some random fun facts from the book:

1) If you manage to anger a camel, you must remove all of your clothes and leave them in a pile for the camel to "fight." The camel will stomp on them, chew them, and toss them around as a substitute for fighting with you, and then it will forgive you and become cooperative again.

2) In case you ever doubted Michener's sense of humor, here's a line that made me laugh out loud: "I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?"

I am constantly at a loss when it comes to summarizing a Michener novel, which often spans thousands of years. This particular novel about Afghanistan, at least, adheres to a single time period (the 1940s), yet the story is extremely wide-ranging. It covers a significant portion of the country and manages to squeeze in observations of various aspects such as culture, religion, history, architecture, food, dance, and more.

The story begins with an American diplomat, Mark Miller, being assigned the task of locating an American woman named Ellen Jasper. She had married an Afghan engineer, Nazrullah, whom she met while he was in college in the United States. However, she stopped writing letters home, and no one had seen her for months.

Miller visits Nazrullah, who is working on a dam project, but Ellen is not there. Along the way, he meets a German doctor named Stiglitz, who turns out to be a Nazi war criminal in hiding. We also learn that Ellen was Nazrullah's second wife, but she was okay with that.

Miller witnesses two public executions, which disgust him. He is informed that they are not mere mob violence, as they might seem, but rather cases carefully weighed by the mullahs. He discovers a split in society between the college-educated city-dwellers who desire to create a modern secular society and the mullahs who wish to continue ancient traditions, including veiling women and having the aforementioned executions. The modern thinkers have the financial means, but the mullahs outnumber them, making change a difficult process.

We observe the enormous difficulties of traveling in the desert, where a wrong turn can cause a Jeep to get stuck in the sand and a person can dehydrate and die within hours. Miller sees the ancient ruins of previous civilizations and spends the night in a caravanserai that contains a pillar where Genghis Khan purportedly sealed thousands of human bodies within a wall. Miller and Stiglitz, the Nazi doctor, spend the night there, fighting when Miller reveals that he is a Jew and sharing stories.

Eventually, Miller finds Ellen Jasper. She has been traveling with a nomadic group called the Koshis and is living with their leader, Zulfikar. Miller and Stiglitz travel with them, learning about their way of life, which partly involves theft and how they manage their camels. The Koshis are a scorned group but have more freedoms as they are outside of society.

Miller reports to his state department bosses, who instruct him to stay with the caravan and follow them to their secret meeting place. He does so and gets to witness caravans of nomads from all over, people who travel as if there were no countries and no borders, a way of life that is soon to come to an end. Along the way, there is more falling in love.

How does it all end? Well, in this land where the past, present, and future are marked by conflict and the power of nature dwarfs human lives, it's difficult to envision a truly happy ending for anyone. However, those who manage to navigate the dangers do find a certain kind of wildness and freedom.

This is the second Michener book that I've read. The only thing holding me back from devouring more of his works is the intimidating length of nearly all of his other books. Caravans, on the other hand, was a relatively short 13 hours on Audible.

The story is quite straightforward. A young Jewish American named Mark Miller, who is working in diplomatic relations at the US Embassy in Kabul in the late 1940s, finds himself assigned the Ellen Jasper case. Ellen, an American girl from a connected family in a small town in Pennsylvania, has run away from college to Afghanistan to marry her boyfriend Nazrullah. She hasn't written to her parents in 13 months and has been reported missing. As Miller embarks on a journey through Afghanistan in search of Ellen and eventually travels with her, he gains a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances of contemporary Afghan life.

He learns various things along the way, such as how to survive desert travel, including dealing with the heat, lack of water, and sandstorms. He also discovers how to maintain good relationships with the camels. Additionally, he experiences the trials and tribulations of dating an Afghani girl. The stealing, reselling, and sharing economy is another aspect he encounters, as well as life as a Kochi (nomad).

As the quote goes, "You cannot find peace in old conventions and beliefs. Yet you are not sufficiently committed to anything to forge new ones for yourself." This quote seems to resonate with Mark Miller's journey as he navigates through the unfamiliar and complex world of Afghanistan.

This novel is now 45 years old.

In my mind, it remains as topical, fascinating, and revelatory as when it was first published.

Michener weaves a great story against the backdrop of tribal politics and Western prejudice that still prevail today.

It portrays Afghanistan as an incredibly complex culture, both safeguarded and exploited by a harsh terrain.

This has further deepened my fascination with its numerous nations, tribes, and incredible beauty.

Someday, someday I'll manage to get there...

Like Nevil Shute, Michener is able to speak through a female character with great credibility and little condescension - not an easy accomplishment for a male writer of this generation.

Bravo, James!

The concept of distant princesses and the valiant men who are dedicated to safeguarding them is truly captivating.

Moreover, having a profound understanding of the Battle for Afghanistan is of great significance.

The Brits, the Russians, and the Americans have all been involved in this complex conflict.

The fact that other countries before us were unable to subdue the situation begs the question: why do we believe that we can succeed where others have failed?

It is truly a fascinating topic that invites further exploration and analysis.

We must consider the historical, political, and cultural factors that have influenced this region and the various attempts to bring stability and peace.

By delving deeper into this subject, we can gain valuable insights and perhaps even find new solutions to the challenges that persist.