Qais Akbar Omar. (2014). A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Qais Akbar Omar. 2014. A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Qais Akbar Omar. A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{B85EAF36-3934-4A8B-B024-4B4F498D9908}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{B85EAF36-3934-4A8B-B024-4B4F498D9908}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/B85/EAF/36/{B85EAF36-3934-4A8B-B024-4B4F498D9908}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/B85/EAF/36/{B85EAF36-3934-4A8B-B024-4B4F498D9908}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374709181
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B009LRWICQ
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374709181
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Qais Akbar Omar

title

A Fort of Nine Towers

dateAdded

2016-12-01T14:38:11.993-05:00

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=1082956
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Fort of Nine Towers An Afghan Family Story

crossRefId

1082956

subtitle

An Afghan Family Story

id

b85eaf36-3934-4a8b-b024-4b4f498d9908

starRating

4.3

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: AFortofNineTowers_9780374709181_1082956
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 1476549
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374709181
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 4/16/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/fort-of-nine?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: AFortofNineTowers_1082956
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B009LRWICQ
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 4/16/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/fort-of-nine?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: AFortofNineTowers_9780374709181_1082956
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374709181
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 4/16/2013
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/fort-of-nine?.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: Terrorism
2. • value: politics
3. • value: War
4. • value: ethnic
5. • value: Afghan War
6. • value: family life
7. • value: anthropology
8. • value: Middle East
9. • value: fort
10. • value: family stories
11. • value: Afghan
12. • value: tradition
13. • value: Regional
14. • value: Politics and government
15. • value: American
16. • value: Religion
17. • value: tower
18. • value: world war
19. • value: Radical Islam
20. • value: Afghanistan
21. • value: England
22. • value: Middle East History
23. • value: Omar
24. • value: Europe
25. • value: forts
26. • value: Personal narratives
27. • value: African American
28. • value: Political prisoners
29. • value: Taliban
30. • value: social
31. • value: Personal Memoirs
32. • value: afghans
33. • value: ethnic conflict
34. • value: jihadist
35. • value: border fort
36. • value: middle eastern conflict
37. • value: autobiographical writing
38. • value: afghanistan culture
39. • value: historical autobiography
40. • value: afghan authors
41. • value: afghanistan history
42. • value: middle eastern authors
43. • value: Afghanistan Conflict
44. • value: brutality of war
45. • value: british army afghanistan
46. • value: cross cultural memoir
47. • value: cultural and social
48. • value: turbulent family history
49. • value: prisoner for life

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Omar, Qais Akbar
   • bioText: Qais Akbar Omar (whose first name is pronounced "Kice") manages his family's carpet business in Kabul and writes books. In 2007, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado. He has studied business at Brandeis University and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Boston University. Omar has lectured on Afghan carpets in Afghanistan, Europe, and the United States. He is the coauthor, with Stephen Landrigan, of Shakespeare in Kabul.
   • name: Qais Akbar Omar

publishDate

2014-04-08T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

A Fort of Nine Towers

fullDescription

One of the rare memoirs of Afghanistan to have been written by an Afghan, A Fort of Nine Towers reveals the richness and suffering of life in a country whose history has become deeply entwined with our own.
For the young Qais Akbar Omar, Kabul was a city of gardens where he flew kites from his grandfather's roof with his cousin Wakeel while their parents, uncles, and aunts drank tea around a cloth spread in the grass. It was a time of telling stories, reciting poetry, selling carpets, and arranging marriages. Then civil war exploded. Their neighborhood found itself on the front line of a conflict that grew more savage by the day.
With rockets falling around them, Omar's family fled, leaving behind everything they owned to take shelter in an old fort—only a few miles distant and yet a world away from the gunfire. As the violence escalated, Omar's father decided he must take his children out of the country to safety. On their perilous journey, they camped in caves behind the colossal Buddha statues in Bamyan, and took refuge with nomad cousins, herding their camels and sheep. While his father desperately sought smugglers to take them over the border, Omar grew up on the road, and met a deaf-mute carpet weaver who would show him his life's purpose.
Later, as the Mujahedin war devolved into Taliban madness, Omar learned about quiet resistance. He survived a brutal and arbitrary imprisonment, and, at eighteen, opened a secret carpet factory to provide work for neighborhood girls, who were forbidden to go to school or even to leave their homes. As they tied knots at their looms, Omar's parents taught them literature and science.
In this stunning coming-of-age memoir, Omar recounts terrifyingly narrow escapes and absurdist adventures, as well as moments of intense joy and beauty. Inflected with folktales, steeped in poetry, A Fort of Nine Towers is a life-affirming triumph.
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content:

     "Mind-boggling . . . a riveting story of war as seen through a child's eyes and summoned from an adult's memory."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Jeanette Winterson, O Magazine
   • content: "If you read only one book this summer, make it this one. It's an astonishing tale of religious barbarians and human hope, of what happened to Kabul before and after the Taliban came to power."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Washington Post
   • content: "Beautifully written, with the pacing and suspense of a novel ... his richly detailed account of growing up in Afghanistan under the warlords and then the Taliban is deeply fulfilling, remarkable not least because he lived to tell the tale."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Economist
   • content: "A poetic, funny and terrifying memoir"
5. • premium: False
   • source: Newsday
   • content: "Lucid, moving . . . a classic autobiography of universal resonance."
6. • premium: False
   • source: The Boston Globe
   • content: "A Fort of Nine Towers captures a time and a place unknown to most Americans . . . graphic, certainly, but it's also sweet and funny and inspiring."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus, starred review
   • content: "As lyrical as it is haunting, this mesmerizing, not-to-be-missed debut memoir is also a loving evocation of a misunderstood land and people . . . A gorgeously rich tapestry of an amazing life and culture."
8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     January 28, 2013
     In this painstaking memoir, Kabul carpet seller and Brandeis M.B.A. student Omar recreates an idyllic childhood gradually wrecked by years of civil war and Taliban oppression. One of some 25 cousins who had the run of the family compound constructed on the Kot-e-Sangi mountainside of Kabul by his grandfather, a Pashtun banker who was also a carpet seller, Omar enjoyed an insular early upbringing, surrounded by doting aunts and uncles, luxuriant gardens, kite flying, copious meals, and a stringent education at school and from his own father, a physics teacher and former boxer who ran a gym near the house. As the factious mujahideen (“holy warriors”) began to fight among each other, living in the compound became untenable, and the extended family took refuge on the other side of the mountain in the mansion owned by his father’s carpet-business partner, a former royal residence now semiruined, called the Qala-e-Noborja, or “Fort of the Nine Towers.” Over subsequent years of turmoil, Omar and his family managed to survive the violence and instability besieging Afghanistan, and whenever they ventured out—for example, when Omar accompanied his grandfather to survey the damage at the old house—the results were horrifying. On one of his fantastic nomadic treks north, he even managed to learn carpet-making from a deaf Turkmen girl with exquisite intuitive technique. Omar’s tale strains credulity, but his prose is deliciously forthright, extravagant, somewhat mischievous, and very Afghan in its sense of long-suffering endurance and also reconciliation.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from March 1, 2013
     A carpet designer and businessman's profoundly moving account of a childhood and adolescence lived amid the Afghan civil war. When Omar was growing up in the early 1990s, his native city of Kabul was "like a huge garden." Life was full and happy, and his only concern was besting his cousin Wakeel at kite flying. But then rival Mujahedeen factions began fighting each other, transforming the once-Edenic city into a bloody wasteland that reminded Omar of "an American horror movie." The family sought refuge in Qala-e-Noborja, a fort on the outskirts of Kabul that a friend of Omar's father had transformed into a lush, green compound. As rockets and gunfire exploded around them, the family planned for their return home. Omar and his father attempted to go back to the family house, only to find it occupied by sadistic soldiers who imprisoned and tortured the pair before freeing them. As the ring of terror tightened around the fort, the family fled Kabul. Their dangerous journey took them through central and northern Afghanistan, where they camped in caves located inside a giant statue of the Buddha and joined nomad relatives on their overland treks. Along the way, Omar met, and fell in love with, an older deaf-mute Turkmen girl who taught him how to weave carpets. These skills would eventually help him support his starving, demoralized family and secretly provide work to young Kabuli women who suffered under the misogynist regime of the Taliban. As lyrical as it is haunting, this mesmerizing, not-to-be-missed debut memoir is also a loving evocation of a misunderstood land and people. A gorgeously rich tapestry of an amazing life and culture.

     COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 1, 2012
      

      Omar's family was forced to flee Kabul when the mujahedin took over Afghanistan, then fled again when the young Omar and his father were briefly kidnapped as the family ventured homeward. They hid out for a year behind the massive Bamiyan Buddha sculptures (since destroyed), learning carpet weaving from itinerant weavers before finally returning to Kabul. At age 18, Omar thwarted the Taliban, at that point in power, by opening a secret carpet shop where boys and girls could work and study. Perfect for readers of books like Gayle Tzemach Lemmon's The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran; with a reading group guide.

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 1, 2013
      Omar's Afghan childhood encompassed the love of an extended family and the violent tyranny of warlords and the Taliban, and he renders every facet with the glorious precision and rich palette of the exquisite carpets that provided a livelihood for his grandfather, father, and, eventually, himself. Kabul in the 1980s was a lush garden, where young Omar flew kites, excelled at school, and played with a band of cousins. The Mujahedin rapidly destroyed this verdant world, and Omar and his family fled the city for the Fort of Nine Towers, an old outpost filled with flowers, fruit trees, deer, peacocks, even a leopard. But war came to this paradise, too, precipitating his family's death-defying cross-country quest for sanctuary. They joined nomadic relatives on a caravan and lived in the caves behind one of the towering Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Taliban later destroyed. Though he is as modest as he is entrancing, Omar clearly was a preternaturally attentive, sensitive boy with a gift for languages and an artistic eye, who embraced the diversity, beauty, and wisdom of Afghan life. He also suffered the soul-scarring horrors of looting, bombs, snipers, homelessness, atrocities, incarceration, and torture. Omar tells this staggering true story of a life and a land of radiance and terror with magnificent humility, grace, and power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

popularity

53

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/b85eaf36-3934-4a8b-b024-4b4f498d9908/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

b85eaf36-3934-4a8b-b024-4b4f498d9908

starRating

4.5

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{B85EAF36-3934-4A8B-B024-4B4F498D9908}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{B85EAF36-3934-4A8B-B024-4B4F498D9908}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/B85/EAF/36/{B85EAF36-3934-4A8B-B024-4B4F498D9908}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/B85/EAF/36/{B85EAF36-3934-4A8B-B024-4B4F498D9908}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Biography & Autobiography
2. • value: Nonfiction

publishDateText

04/08/2014

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780374157647

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

One of the rare memoirs of Afghanistan to have been written by an Afghan, A Fort of Nine Towers reveals the richness and suffering of life in a country whose history has become deeply entwined with our own.
For the young Qais Akbar Omar, Kabul was a city of gardens where he flew kites from his grandfather's roof with his cousin Wakeel while their parents, uncles, and aunts drank tea around a cloth spread in the grass. It was a time of telling stories, reciting poetry, selling carpets, and arranging marriages. Then civil war exploded. Their neighborhood found itself on the front line of a conflict that grew more savage by the day.
With rockets falling around them, Omar's family fled, leaving behind everything they owned to take shelter in an old fort—only a few miles distant and yet a world away from the gunfire. As the violence escalated, Omar's father decided he must take his children out of the country to safety. On their perilous journey, they...

sortTitle

Fort of Nine Towers An Afghan Family Story

crossRefId

1082956

subtitle

An Afghan Family Story

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

bisacCodes

1. • code: BIO026000
   • description: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs