This is required reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of Afghanistan and of what it feels like to be a bicultural young person pulled between continents.

By turns hilarious and terrifying ... This is a book that leaves dust in your hair and blows sand into your teeth ... America and Afghanistan are joined in the story and in the heart of Said Hyder Akbar.

Said Hyder Akbar's ordinary suburban Californian life was turned upside-down after September 1 lth. Hyder's father, a scion of an Afghan political family, left for Afghanistan to become the new president's chief spokesman and later the governor of Kunar, a rural province. Obsessed since childhood with a country he had never visited, seventeen-year-old Hyder convinced his father to let him join him. Working alongside his father at the presidential palace and in Kunar gave Hyder a unique perspective on the creation of democratic government in Afghanistan. In Come Back to Afghanistan, Hyder interweaves his personal journey - that of a teenager struggling to find his identity in his parents' homeland -with his travels, which take him from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands, to give a dramatic account of political and civilian life in post-Taliban Afghanistan.