Caravans

Must state right off that I am a huge fan of Michener. This title, however, I felt started off as classic Michener with wonderful portrayals of the country and culture of Afghanistan. Something happened about three-fourths of the way through and the focus turned on some really self-centered and unlikable characters.

Amazing that this book was published in 1963 but so much sounds exactly like what we hear on the news today. Names of places heard on the evening news such as Kandahar and Kabul are vividly drawn. The culture of the places in the late 1940's helps explain much of how the situation today developed. Michener writes about women in the chaderi (which we have come to know as the burqa), the Mullahs, and the extreme violence toward show more women. All of that was fascinating and I simply couldn't put the book down.

The book follows Miller, the main character sent from America to find a "lost" American woman named Ellen who married an Afghan. His reactions to the other "ferangi" (foreigners) is interesting and enlightening. The sad part is that he finds Ellen. From then on I felt a shift to her as the focus of the story. I just could not buy into this Bryn Mawr collegiate hiking all over the country with a group of nomads looking so lovely and jumping from one "free" man to one even in her eyes "freer." The German Nazi Dr. Stiglitz comes across as much more believable but his relationship to Ellen just turns the entire novel into somewhat of a soap opera.

That said, I still would recommend the book for anyone wanting to get a better understanding of Afghanistan and its vast amount of history. show less

Moves quickly and gives you a few engaging (if slightly caricatured) people to follow. A good slap dash adventure to give you a sense of the diversity and complicated history (esp cold war geopolitics) of Afghanistan, but by no means an authoritative history or "accurate" version. In fact, these days it tells us more about the ambitions and obsessions of imperial-minded Americans than anything else.

I had forgotten how good Michener’s historical novels are. This one has a narrow focus of a 1946 caravan from the deserts of Helmand province into the high mountains of the Hindu Kush in the north with the Sochi tribe. Michener foreshadowed the issues that brought the US to wage war there in 2003. The story focuses on the small US embassy in Kabul to make an inquirery into the whereabouts of a young American woman named Ellen Jaspar who married an Afghan and hadn’t written home to her bourgeois parents back in Pennsylvania.
Mark Miller new to his post gets the assignment which leads to a life changing experience of eventually joining a caravan. Social justice, modernism vs traditional life styles, religion and love are examined show more through the eyes of 3 westerners and their Afghan “friends”. Recommended. show less

I'm a huge Michener fan and this book, while out of the norm for Michener, was nonetheless enjoyable. Young American, Ellen Jasper marries a young Afghan engineer (already having an Afghan wife) and moves to Afghanistan. Her parents do not hear from her for 17 months and fear the worst. It is the job of 26 year old American ambassador Mark Miller to locate her. Mark is thrown in with a German Nazi doctor, a tribal camel herder, and a whole host of other interesting characters. This book's setting is vague, but I would guess about 1950's-1960's as it was sometime after the Nuremberg Trials and before the invasion of Russia. Besides learning a lot of Afghan history, I also learned a lot of culture. 449 pages

I’ve always thought plot and character were not as important to Michener as history, culture, geography and topography along with more than a smattering of philosophy. This book did not change my opinion. On the other hand I learned a lot about Afghanistan and the nomadic tribes of Central Asia that I probably would not have read about in a non-fiction format.

i am a much bigger fan of michener's longer, detailed histories/stories. this story (and the characters) didn't really grab me at all. but he has some amazing information and insight into mid-late 1940's afghanistan (written in 1963), much of which seems pretty prescient today. he was writing at a time when most americans probably hadn't even registered afghanistan on the world map, and he writes of places whose names have now become so familiar, even if the place itself isn't. that alone makes this book interesting to read now. again, i wasn't really interested in the story at all, but i enjoyed reading about the land, terrain, the nomadic life and tribes, and the people (as caricatured as some of them seemed to be).

Fascinating to read about some of the history of this country and I got a better understanding of how these people may be feeling about all the other countries trying to help them. This was an easier read for me than his other books partially because it was not so drawn out and there was a story to it. Liked finding about the characters different ways of looking at religion. More a story of Miller, the American officer, and his thoughts about the country than about the American girl who was missing.