Word: amir
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From his swimming pool in Metula, Amir Melzer surveys the new front line in Israel's campaign against Palestinian terrorist groups. Beyond the apricot orchard at the foot of his garden, white pickets mark the Lebanese border. The plain stretches from there to the dusty heights of Syria, where Israeli jets last week struck a training camp of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At the other edge of the fruit field on Monday, a sniper hid in the Lebanese village of Kafr Kileh, which abuts the border fence, and shot dead an Israeli soldier in revenge for the air raid...
...quiet, religious, hardworking man, who left home every morning at daybreak and returned late. In Chimatpada, where Hanif's auto-rickshaw sits covered in blue tarpaulin, there is now a sense of shock and bewilderment over the arrests. "We simply can't believe it," says Amir Jaha, who lives two blocks from the Hanifs. "They were just like...
...Strolling in Golden Gate Park, Amir watches a pair of kites overhead and recalls his childhood friend and servant, Hassan, who is a Hazara, one of Afghanistan's persecuted minorities. The boys are inseparable, but their friendship is fraught with tension. Amir is quiet, bookish and jealous of the attention his father bestows on the athletic, courageous Hassan. Angry and frustrated, he plays cruel jokes on his friend, guiltily justifying them on the basis of Hassan's low status: "Because history isn't easy to overcome. I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, and nothing was ever going...
...Amir believes he can gain his father's love by winning an annual kite-flying contest, where boys battle for supremacy armed with kite strings coated in ground glass. He longs to present his father with the last kite to fall: "I'd make a grand entrance, the prized trophy in my bloodied hands. Then the old warrior would walk up to the young one, embrace him, acknowledge his worthiness." Amir wins the battle and dispatches Hassan to capture the fallen kite. But Hassan is caught by a group of bullies who make him an offer: leave the kite...
...times, the book suffers from relentless earnestness and somewhat hackneyed descriptions. But Hosseini has a remarkable ability to imprison the reader in horrific, shatteringly immediate scenes?not least the incident in which Hassan is violated. The result is a sickening sensation of complicity. Like Amir, the reader watches the suffering and does nothing. Hosseini turns that shared guilt into a subtle condemnation of a world that watched the rape of Afghanistan?first by the Soviets, then by regional warlords and the Taliban. True evil, he suggests, comes when good people allow bad things to happen...