Luz Harvey

A slightly disjointed amble through central Asia, taking in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. A bunch of not overly connected travel pieces makes "The Carpet Wars" sometimes confuses the reader as to when events happened and the sometimes oblique connections to carpets can make digesting the book hard work. Kremmer makes up for this though with some evocative writing of the areas of central Asia that rarely appears in travel articles. ( )

The carpet wars by Christopher Kremmer is a hefty volume of some 480 pages. I had started reading the with quite a lot of interest, but gradually got increasingly irritated about the pretense of it.

The book is published with an introduction, acknowledgements, notes (10 pages), bibliography and suggested readings (7 pages), a glossary (5 pages), a timeline (1979-2003) and an index. These features give the book the feel of a very thoroughly documented volume, from which the reader might learn a great deal about "the Islamic heartlands".

It also gives us the feeling that the author or publisher wishes to lift the book up from the level of journalism to background documentation or a more steady nature. However, despite aforementioned props the editor / author has failed to do so. In the introduction, the author says that the largest part of the book was written before 2001, but the reader never finds out when exactly various parts of the book were written. In most publications of this kind, the acknowledgements or in another part of the book the reader may find an overview with thanks to publishers who printed or published earlier versions of articles or reports. Another elegant solution would have been printing a date or year at the top or foot of each section, but this has also been omitted. Meanwhile, the author makes minimal reference to current affairs which might give a clue to the date of the piece, with the exception of his mention that he had been to places before or had met people before up to 20 years earlier. One gradually gets the feeling that these temporal references have been intentionally omitted or removed.

Unfortunately, the respective articles have very little substance (only 10 pages of notes were added). Most of the text consists of the authors adventures, describing people and places in a freely detailed journalistic style, with small embellishments about history and anecdotes, to entertain the reader. A red thread throughout the book is the author's claimed interest in carpets. At times this motive is forced into the text, as in the case of the story of the man who wants to sell just one carpet. It much more seems that the author has inserted this thread as a ploy to connect the different stories, and create a sense of unity. The title remains puzzling, because there are no wars, really, let alone "carpet wars" whatever that might refer to.

The book consists of nine parts, most of which comprising three chapters, introducing Kabul, Kandahar, Peshawar, Baghdad, Tajikistan, Kashmir and Esfahan among other places. But after finishing the book, nothing memorable enough remains, except for descriptions and references to the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. But without a distinctive time frame, events or theme, all sections seem very similar, and towards the end of the book one wonders if there is an overarching story to be told at all. ( )

http://amiralace.blogspot.com/2007/11/carpet-wars.html ( )

Christopher Kremmer's book takes you on a journey through the Central Asian countries most frequently in the news today, and provides an incomparable insight. The largest, and first, section, is an account of events in Afghanistan, which he has witnessed first-hand as a foreign correspondent.
This book is no dry history, nor is it merely a travelogue, nor is it merely an extended piece of journalism.

Kremmer comes to know and befriend people of different backgrounds within the region, and it is their stories, as well as the carpet trade and stories of emblematic carpets, through which the narrative is woven. We care about the future of the peoples of the region, because we care about what becomes of Kremmer's friends.

What Christopher has managed to do is to make the internecine politics, the inhumanities, the brutalities, comprehensible, through his humanisation of peoples who might in lesser hands be reduced to the merely 'exotic' or even worse 'unknowable and inhuman'.

Other books to read if you are interested are 'Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan' by Jason Elliot and 'The Root of Wild Madder' by Brian Murphy.

I thoroughly recommend these books if you desire to reach some understanding of a region of such importance to us all. ( )