Twenty Years
Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation
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Narrated by:
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Fajer Al-Kaisi
About this listen
An intimate history of the Afghan war―and the young Afghans whose dreams it enabled and dashed.
No country was more deeply affected by 9/11 than Afghanistan: an entire generation grew up amid the upheaval that began that day. Young Afghans knew the promise of freedom, democracy, and safety, fought with each other over its meaning―and then witnessed its collapse. In Twenty Years, the Wall Street Journal correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen draws on more than a decade of reporting from the country to tell Afghanistan’s story from a new angle. Through the eyes of newly empowered women, skilled entrepreneurs, driven insurgents, and abandoned Western allies, we see the United States and its partners bring new freedoms and wealth, only to preside over the corruption, war-lordism, and social division that led to the Taliban’s return to power.
Rasmussen relates this history via two main characters: Zahra, who returns from abroad with high hopes for her liberated county, where she must fight to escape a brutal marriage and rebuild her life; and Omari, who joins the Taliban to protect the honor of his village and country and winds up wrestling with doubt and the trauma of war after achieving victory. We also meet Parasto, who risks her life running clandestine girls’ schools under the new Taliban regime, and Fahim, a rags-to-riches tycoon who is forced to flee. With intimate access to these and other characters, Rasmussen offers deep insight into a country betrayed by the West and Taliban alike.
©2024 Sune Engel Rasmussen (P)2024 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Critic reviews
“An unflinching, knowledgeable examination of betrayed hopes, broken fates, and damaged lives—the record of America’s failed experiment to remake Afghanistan. Sune Engel Rasmussen has crisscrossed the country and delivered a deeply empathetic book that illuminates the human toll exacted on the Afghans—those who had believed in American promises of a better future, and those who had fought America in the battlefield.”—Yaroslav Trofimov, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Our Enemies Will Vanish
"Sune Engel Rasmussen has crafted a rich narrative showing how America's longest war affected Afghans, from the women who bought into the idea that they could help chart their country's future to the men who were skeptical of the future that the West would actually deliver. He's managed to weave together all the faces of Afghanistan, and all the complexities, contradictions, surprises and tragedies lived over decades of conflict. His book manages to be both a lesson in empathy and a vital snapshot of history."—Kim Barker, author of The Taliban Shuffle
"Sune Engel Rasmussen's coverage of Afghanistan has long been superlative. Now comes his excellent book, which is deeply reported, well-written, and moving, telling the story of America's abandonment of the Afghan people. It's a somber story that he tells very well."—Peter Bergen, author of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden
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- The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nation—and Created a Legend
- By: Joe Pappalardo
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Roy Bean was an American saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, who called himself "The Only Law West of the Pecos". He and his three brothers set out from Kentucky in the mid 1840s, heading into the American frontier to find their fortunes. Their lifetimes of triumphs, tragedies, laurels, and scandals will play out on the battlefields of Mexico, in shady dealings in California city halls, inside eccentric saloon courtrooms of Texas, and along the blood-soaked Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to New Mexico. They will kill men, and murder will likewise stalk them.
By: Joe Pappalardo
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Her Lotus Year
- China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson
- By: Paul French
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl “Win” Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China. In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her “Lotus Year,” referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home.
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An interesting new look at Wallis Simpson
- By boleyn1532 on 12-09-24
By: Paul French
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Dark Sun
- The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 28 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War. Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history discloses how and why the United States decided to create the bomb that would dominate world politics for more than forty years.
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Highly Recommend
- By Daniel Callaghan on 12-15-24
By: Richard Rhodes
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Ghosts of Panama
- A Strongman Out of Control, A Murdered Marine, and the Special Agents Caught in the Middle of an Invasion
- By: Mark Harmon, Leon Carroll
- Narrated by: Mark Harmon
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Panama, 1989. The once warm relationship between United States and Gen. Manuel Noriega has eroded dangerously. Newly elected President George Bush has declared the strongman a drug trafficker and a rigger of elections. Intimidation on the streets is a daily reality for U.S. personnel and their families. The nation is a powder keg. Naval Investigative Service (NIS) Special Agent Rick Yell has worked the job in Panama since 1986, and lives there with his wife Annya and infant child. Like most NIS agents, he’s a civilian with no military rank with a specialty in working criminal cases.
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Excellent overall and more coherent than Ghosts of Honolulu.
- By Thomas Wilson on 11-25-24
By: Mark Harmon, and others
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V13
- Chronicle of a Trial
- By: Emmanuel Carrère
- Narrated by: Braden Wright
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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A moving, hard-hitting account of the Paris attacks trial by France’s leading nonfiction writer.
By: Emmanuel Carrère