Christina Lamb in Afghanistan

"War wasn't beautiful at all. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen and it made me do the ugliest thing I had ever done. The real story of war wasn't about the firing and the fighting, some Boy's Own adventure of goodies and baddies ... It was about the people ... the sons and daughters, the mothers and fathers."

So writes Christina Lamb in her new book The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan. The title of the book refers to one of the few social gatherings Afghanistan women were allowed under the Taliban regime. Women carried baskets of needles, thread and cloth to houses where they gathered to write, read poetry, teach and learn. Children playing in the street would alert them of approaching Taliban to give them time to hide papers and pick up sewing needles, because the art, literature and intellectual fulfillment they craved enough to risk their lives for was very strictly forbidden. Though their story is one thread in a book that impressively weaves together disparate pieces of a country and its complicated history, it is a beautiful one and a metaphor for Lamb's writing as well. She risks her own life for a passionate belief that stories need to be told and beauty is never lost.

The book merges Lamb's time in the late 1980s as a young foreign correspondent covering the Afghanistan-Soviet conflict, and the time she spent there after September 11. She arrived in Afghanistan an idealistic adventurer "stumbling out of a battered mini-bus in the Old City of the frontier town of Peshawar, dizzy with Kipling and diesel fumes." She had romantic notions of faraway adventures and despite all she has seen, the romantic notions persevere on her return to the country years later. In the midst of mass destruction, death and ruin, Lamb is quick to point out the bird singing, the flower pushing defiantly through the dirt. She captures an essence of culture, tradition and pride of a people and land that is impossible to see in news accounts. And in doing so, gently guides us around any stereotypes we may have unwittingly formed. She is close to the people and her conversations with the exiled royal family and longtime friendship with Hamid Karzai, now president of Afghanistan, provide fascinating and deeply intimate material.

One of the eeriest sections in the book, titled "Mullahs on Motorbikes", is an account of her friendships with the men who would become the Taliban. At the time they were fighting the Soviet Union. They were idealistic youths who loved their country yet

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