Includes bibliographical references (pages 341-342) and index

The Taliban torturer -- Mullahs on motorbikes -- Inside the house of knowledge -- The royal court in exile -- The sewing circles of Herat -- The secret of glass -- Unpainting the peacocks -- The story of Abdullah -- Face to face with the Taliban -- A letter from Kabul

"Twenty-one-year-old Christina Lamb left suburban England for Peshawar on the frontier of the Afghan war. Captivated, she spent two years tracking the final stages of the mujaheddin victory over the Soviets, as Afghan friends smuggled her in and out of their country in a variety of guises." "Returning to Afghanistan after the attacks on the World Trade Center to report for Britain's Sunday Telegraph, Lamb discovered the people no one else had written about: the abandoned victims of almost a quarter century of war. Among them, the brave women writers of Herat who risked their lives to carry on a literary tradition under the guise of sewing circles; the princess whose place was surrounded by tanks on the eve of her wedding; the artist who painted out all the people in his works to prevent them from being destroyed by the Taliban, and Khalil Ahmed Hassami, a former Taliban torturer who admitted to breaking the spines of men and then making them stand on their heads."--Jacket

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