Dancing in the Mosque by Homeira Qaderi

This is a memoir, written by an Afghan woman who has ties to the University of Iowa as a graduate of the international writer's program, who is communicating with the son that she had to abandon in Afghanistan in order to have a life for herself. It is a book that is achingly sad, filled with all that you would imagine it would hold in terms of the prospects that women there face. It is true that the Taliban was a brutal part of Afghanistan's past and now it's present, but without them the country is still extremely restrictive for women. The author was a child during the Russian occupation, then lived under the Taliban, followed by the US occupation. This is all told without historical context, reading as a young girl growing up and coming to realizations about what was and was not possible, rather than as a polical commentary. It is said that Afghanistan is where empires go to die, that going back to the time of Alexander the Great there have been invaders on a regular basis but no other country has truly conquered them. That said, the women of Afghanistan have a potential that will remain untapped, unexplored, and leaving no hope for an economically independent country. The author has lobbied for foreign aid to be linked to women's human rights, but at the end of this book that seemed like a very distant goal indeed.