Kabul Beauty School - Deborah Rodriguez

This was a difficult book to read, because it's so sad to think about how difficult, hopeless, and scary some people's lives are. This would be a great book for someone who has grown up in a privileged way in Western society and still complains about how awful their life is - I bet most of those whiners couldn't survive a single day in the life of any of the Afghani women in this book. The author is an American woman who went to Afghanistan and ended up starting a beauty school in a culture that has been ravaged by a long war with Russia and then a terrifying rule under the Taliban. I could understand why the author felt so strongly about helping the Afghani women, I felt for them too, and their stories were heartbreaking. However, the author is a bit too much of a baby boomer for me - sometimes she does things that are driven by her hippy-dippy idealistic thought process but are not necessarily wise choices in a culture that is extremely conservative, and vastly different from Western culture, etc. I hope to someday hear an update with good news about the women in this book. They are strong and they are survivors and I hope they continue to survive, and thrive.