Word: runner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have to be living under a rock-or perhaps driving a Ford Pinto-to be unaware that Japanese auto manufacturers have conquered foreign markets. Toyota recently passed GM to become the world's largest carmaker, and even runner-up brands like Honda are in better shape than their struggling American counterparts. But back home, the news isn't so golden. Thanks to an aging, shrinking population and lackluster consumer spending, sales of full-size vehicles in Japan last year were the lowest since 1977. Mighty Toyota may have posted a record global profit of $18.6 billion...
...going to write a novel about an expatriate Afghan returning to the land of his birth, the usual way to do it would be, first, return to Afghanistan, and then, second, write a novel about it. Khaled Hosseini did it backward. He wrote the runaway best-seller The Kite Runner first, about an Afghan living in California who returns home to redeem a moment of cowardice from his childhood. Only in 2003, when the book was already done, did Hosseini go back to Kabul, the city where he was born. He hadn't seen it in 27 years...
Hosseini is almost certainly the most famous Afghan in the world. Even though The Kite Runner is about a complex Middle Eastern culture, in which Americans are supposed to be uninterested, the book has sold over 4 million copies in three years. A movie version will be released this fall. But there's an irony to Hosseini's success: he became famous as the face and voice of a country he hadn't seen since he was a kid, and whose sufferings under the Taliban he completely escaped. "It's sheer luck," he says, "blind, dumb luck that...
...Newspapers are becoming websites, photos are becoming JPEGs, and songs are becoming MP3s. But what does this great digital awakening mean for the book? To find out, I--as the only person in the U.S. who has never read Khaled Hosseini--downloaded his novel onto a Sony Reader. Kite Runner, meet Blade Runner...
...obsolete. You can use Google Books to retrieve a single valuable snippet of information from a book, but you could never actually read a whole book on a computer screen. The Sony Reader isn't going to displace the humble book anytime soon either. Just to get Kite Runner onto the Reader, I had to charge it, find a computer running Windows XP--we're a Mac shop around here--stare down a cryptic error message and update some software. The half-second delay when you press the turn-the-page button eventually becomes maddening, and you can't scribble...