<p>Road Trips, a memoir by Tamim Ansary, recounts stories from his years as part of the American ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture, after he arrived from Afghanistan where he was born and raised. The book revolves around three arduous journeys he launched from his home base in Portland, Oregon, between 1969, when he hitchhiked across North America with five dollars in his pocket, and 1975, when he and a girlfriend went on a four-month road trip that ended up in the Yucatan jungle near the ruins of Tulum. These odysseys are bracketed by a prologue, in which ten-year-old Ansary accompanies his father on a journey to find a legendary alabaster mountain in southwestern Afghanistan; and an epilogue, in which Ansary stumbles on a sheaf of long-lost letters from his counterculture years. The stories unfold against the familiar background of communes and collectives, Woodstock and Watergate, sex, dope, acid, rock’n’roll, and the end of civilization as we know it, but at heart this is not a history of those all too-well-chronicled times; it’s a mythic private story of which we all have some idiosyncratic version of our own: the passage from wonderstruck childhood through tortured adulthood to contemplative old age.</p>

Road Trips, Becoming an American in the vapor trail of The Sixties

Travel

ANSARY, TAMIM

Asia

Kajakai Press

<p>Snapshots is a collection of personal narratives and poems by 15 Afghan American writers from the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of California. The first collection of its kind, this book gives a subtle glimpse of a new immigrant community through the eyes of its first American generation. The Afghan American community was born some 30 years ago, after catastrophe shattered Afghanistan: a revolution, the Soviet invasion, a civil war, and finally the rise of the Taliban, a string of events that claimed over a million lives and drove as many as ten million Afghans into homeless exile. Some hundred thousand of those refugees made their way to America and a good many settled in California; where the largest Afghan community outside Asia coalesced in the East Bay suburbs of San Francisco. Now, the first generation of Afghan Americans has come of age; most were born here; others left Afghanistan as very young children. For this generation, growing up in the shadow of their parents tragedy, Afghanistan is the dream that permeates every waking moment. In their poems and narratives, you can see this dream of Afghanistan twining with the reality of America to form a new thread in the American fabric.</p>

Snapshots: This Afghan American Life

Tamim Ansary

Yalda Asmatey

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Books by Kajakai Press