Said Hyder Akbar was living an ordinary suburban life in California when the shocking events of September 11, 2001, turned his world upside down. After the fall of the Taliban, Hyder's father, a scion of an Afghan political family, sold his business - a hip-hop clothing store in Oakland - and left for Afghanistan, where he became President Hamid Karzai's chief spokesman. Obsessed since youth with a country he had never even visited, seventeen-year-old Hyder convinced his father to let him join him during three successive summer vacations. In Afghanistan, Hyder witnessed a scarred country at a time of radical change, its hope for the future marred by blood feuds, poverty, and divided loyalties.Working alongside his father in the presidential palace gave Hyder a front-row seat at the creation of Afghanistan's first post-Taliban government. Later, Hyder's father was appointed the governor of Kunar, a volatile province that borders Pakistan. There, Hyder observed a world few Americans get to see, at one point serving as a translator at the secret U.S. military interrogation of a suspected terrorist who later died in custody.Throughout his travels in Afghanistan, Hyder carried a minidisc recorder; he kept it rolling even as he ducked for cover on the floor of a U.S. military Humvee during a twenty-minute ambush. His radio documentaries, which aired on This American Life, have garnered several awards, including an Overseas Press Club citation. The immediacy of these recordings is captured in this extraordinary book, in which Hyder interweaves his personal journey - a teenager struggling with his identity in his parents' homeland - with a dramatic behind-the-scenes account of political and civilian life in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Uncommonly wise and insightful, Hyder journeys from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands, revealing Afghanistan as we have never seen or understood it before. Read Less