When East Meets West

In the aftermath of 9/11 when many U.S. citizens fervently sought revenge on the Osama Bin Laden and Afghanistan for its role in the attacks, there was an email that circulated virally regarding the situation in Afghanistan and the prospects for its future if the U.S. decided to attack. The email was written by an Afgan-American named Tamim Ansary who had initially only sent the email to some of his friends. Before he knew it, he had become an Internet celebrity. He wrote this memoir after his email made its way around the world.
West of Kabul, East of New York is a touching memoir by Ansari whose parents sent him to the U.S. to finish high school. He then went to Reed College (as did I briefly) and settled down in the U.S. It is a well-written and a timely meditation on the relationship between the East and the West and between Islam and the rest of the world. Ansary is rather pessimistic about the future of East-West relations, but this is still a work worth reading.
Czar