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Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier
Joel Hafvenstein
#UC0652
Hardcover, 337 pages; 2007
$19.96
We had come to Helmand thinking of opium as the local currency, and had tried to replace it with cash. But security was the real currency of Afghanistan. The traumatized population of Helmand would trade almost anything for it, follow anyone who could offer it.
In 2004, Joel Hafvenstein began working in Afghanistan for Chemonics, an American-funded aid program designed to offer legal alternatives to poppy farming. Opium Season lucidly recounts his experiences—sometimes hopeful, sometimes tragic—in the fractured and turbulent land. Hafvenstein offers enlightening portraits of the local people, and unflinching details of Chemonics’s mostly unsuccessful struggle to make a positive impact. With remarkable clarity and abundant thoughtfulness, Hafvenstein presents a spellbinding picture of the post-9/11 Afghan frontier—and an unsettling perspective on foreign relief efforts in the dangerously unstable country.
(CH)
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