A collection of David Sedaris’s essays might be the perfect
antidote to these anxiety-filled times.
As to be expected there are many laugh-out-loud moments, but some
serious content as well. Sedaris always
mixes darkness with light, so his revelations about his sister Tiffany and his
mother’s alcoholism counterbalance the oftentimes wacky encounters he has with
people on his seemingly unending book tours. Sometimes I get the feeling I’ve
read some of these before, maybe I have, but it also could be partly due to
being a lifelong fan.
The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

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