"Hamida Ghafour and her family fled Kabul in 1981 when the Russians invaded. In this memoir, she tells how she went back in 2003 as a journalist to cover the country's post-9/11 reconstruction." "As Hamida is drawn deeper into her country's present, other members of her family come to life for us - her great-grandfather the Sufi mystic, her poetess grandmother who urged women to unveil, her great-uncle who wrote the first democratic constitution, her brave cousin Bahodine who paid for his views with his life. Her parents and their student days of hamburgers, hunting trips with American hippies and searches for the perfect pomegranate. In her family's past she finds the story of Afghanistan itself." "She finds its future in people like the Midwestern beautician teaching women a new kind of independence, her cousin the parliamentary candidate and the archaeologist digging for his country's lost civilization - in the form of a giant Sleeping Buddha."--Jacket.