Summary: Qais Akbar Omar talks about growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan, in his memoir A Fort of Nine Towers , which reveals the richness and suffering of life in that country. When he was a child, Kabul was a city of gardens where he flew kites while his family drank tea, it was a time of telling stories, reciting poetry, selling carpets. Then civil war exploded, and his family fled, taking shelter in an old fort. As the Mujahedin war devolved into Taliban rule, Omar learned about quiet resistance, and opened a secret carpet factory to provide work for neighborhood girls.
