“Love is woven all through it: for a country and her people, for a mother, for a beloved wife.”

Twenty-two-years-old and newly graduated from Barnard College, Jean Boyce sets out with husband Walt, her high school sweetheart, on an adventure across the world to Afghanistan. It is 1948, just three years after the end of World War II and a year after the bloody Partition of India and Pakistan, and Gandhi’s assassination. The Cold War has begun, and talk is of an imminent World War III with the Soviet Union. It is a time when Afghans distrusted the British, their former colonial rulers, whom they suspect of deliberately keeping their country mired in the past without railroads, airports, or roads so as to serve as a buffer between the Soviet Union and British India. Many Afghans want to modernize and see education Read more…