Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - Orginally published as The Taliban Shuffle

Zusatztext 77571612 Informationen zum Autor Kim Barker was the South Asia bureau chief for  The Chicago Tribune  from 2004 to 2009, based in New Delhi and Islamabad. Her book about those years,  The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan , a dark comedic take on her time in South Asia, was published by Doubleday. The movie version,  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot , was released in 2016, starring Tina Fey, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina, Margot Robbie and Billy Bob Thornton. Barker is now a metro reporter at  The New York Times , specializing in investigative reporting and narrative writing. Before joining  The Times  in mid-2014, Ms. Barker was an investigative reporter at  ProPublica , writing mainly about campaign finance and the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Klappentext Now a Major Motion Picture titled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot starring Tina Fey, Margot Robbie, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina, and Billy Bob Thornton. From tea with warlords in the countryside to parties with drunken foreign correspondents in the "dry" city of Kabul, journalist Kim Barker captures the humor and heartbreak of life in post-9/11 Afghanistan and Pakistan in this profound and darkly comic memoir. As Barker grows from awkward newbie to seasoned reporter, she offers an insider's account of the region's "forgotten war" at a time when all eyes were turned to Iraq. Candid, self-deprecating, and laugh-out-loud funny, Barker shares both her affection for the absurdities of these two hapless countries and her fear for their future stability. Leseprobe CHAPTER 1 WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME I had always wanted to meet a warlord. So we parked our van on the side of the beige road and walked up to the beige house, past dozens of skinny young soldiers brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles and wearing mismatched khaki outfits and rope belts hiked high on their waists. Several flaunted kohl eyeliner and tucked yellow flowers behind their ears. Others decorated their rifle butts with stickers of flowers and Indian movie starlets. Male ethnic Pashtuns loved flowers and black eyeliner and anything fluorescent or sparkly, maybe to make up for the beige terrain that stretched forever in Afghanistan, maybe to look pretty. Outside the front door, my translator Farouq and I took off our shoes before walking inside and sitting cross-legged on the red cushions that lined the walls. The decorations spanned that narrow range between unicorn-loving prepubescent girl and utilitarian disco. Bright, glittery plastic flowers poked out of holes in the white walls. The curtains were riots of color. We waited. I was slightly nervous about our reception. Once, warlord Pacha Khan Zadran had been a U.S. ally, one of the many Afghan warlords the Americans used to help drive out the Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his minions after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But like a spoiled child, Pacha Khan had rebelled against his benefactors, apparently because no one was paying enough attention to him. First he turned against the fledg-ling Afghan government, then against his American allies. In an epic battle over a mountain pass, the Americans had just killed the warlord’s son. The Pashtun code required revenge, among other things, and now, six days after the battle, here I was, a fairly convenient American, waiting like a present on a pillow in Pacha Khan’s house, hoping to find a story edgy enough to make it into my newspaper—not easy considering it was March 2003, and there were other things going on in the world. But Farouq told me not to worry. He had a plan. Pacha Khan soon marched into the room. He certainly looked the warlord part, wearing a tan salwar kameez, the region’s ubiquitous traditional long shirt and baggy pants that resembled pajamas, along with a brown vest, a bandolier of bull...

Product details

• Authors: Kim Barker, Kimberly Barker
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 29.02.2016
• EAN: 9781101973127
• ISBN: 978-1-101-97312-7
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 205 mm x 12 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies