A review by sabinereads
The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village by Anna Badkhen

4.0

Anna Badhken catalogs her time in the village of Oqa, a carpet-making, intensely rural & impoverished village in Afghanistan. Having spent several years in Afghanistan, Badhken's knowledge of the country emerges beautifully and rarely between the book's meat: its careful, thorough portraits of the village's inhabitants. Badhken avoids generalizing about Afghanistan, rural life, or poverty while providing devastating scenes from daily life in Oqa. Alongside Badhken, readers celebrate villagers' births and deaths, witness opium addiction and starvation, love and camaraderie. Badhken's clear, complex way of capturing a cluster of people recalls Rory Stewart and Katherine Boo, both of whom have the impressive ability to present their foreign subjects in a manner that is both enormously compassionate and brutally truthful. Absolutely recommend.