Tamim Ansary

Tamim Ansary gives a talk this evening on “the often-interrupted history of Afghanistan” as engagingly elucidated in his newest book, Games Without Rules (Public Affairs, 2012). With deft narrative momentum, Ansary helps the reader get past the generalizations and assumptions that obscure the realities of Afghanistan and its national history since the mid-1700s, revealing a human arc of intention, ambition and conflict within that country and among those who would try to dominate it from outside for geopolitical and economic reasons of their own.

Ansary first came to wide notice with his book West of Kabul, East of New York, a personal narrative emerging from the events of Sept. 11 and his attempt to understand the complexities, contradictions and continuities of his own heritage, Afghanistan-born and raised to an Afghan father and American mother, and his emigration to the U.S. and coming into maturity as an Afghan-American. His subsequent books include a novel, The Widow’s Husband, set in Afghanistan in the mid-1800s at a time of British domination, and 2009’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. His writing career actually started a few decades ago, with numerous books for the educational market. Ansary lives in San Francisco and is widely known and very active in the writing community here.