Road Trips, a memoir by Tamim Ansary, recounts stories from his years as part of the American counterculture of the '60s and '70s, after he arrived from Afghanistan where he was born and where he spent the first sixteen years of his life. The book revolves around three arduous journeys launched from his home base in Portland, Oregon, between 1969 (when he hitchhiked across North America with five dollars in his pocket) and 1975 ( when he and a girlfriend went on a four-month road trip ending in the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula. These odysseys are bracketed by a prologue in which ten-year-old Ansary accompanies his father on a journey to find a legendary alabaster mountain in southwestern Afghanistan, and an epilogue in which Ansary stumbles on a sheaf of long-lost letters from his counterculture years. The stories unfold against the familiar background of communes and collectives, Woodstock and Watergate, sex, dope, acid, rock'n'roll, and the end of civilization as we know it, but this is not a history of those all too-well-chronicled times. It's about a collective dream from which the dreamers woke up alone; and it's about coming of age, that mythic private tale of which everyone has their own idiosyncratic version--the passage from wonderstruck childhood through tortured adulthood to contemplative old age.
Author Biography:
Afghan-American author Tamim Ansary was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. His father was the first Afghan to marry an American woman, his mother the first American woman to marry an Afghan and living with him in Afghanistan as an Afghan. Ansary came to America at the age of sixteen, finished high school in Colorado, and graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He wrote Games Without Rules, The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan, nominated for a Northern California Book Award in 2012. His bestselling Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes won the Northern California Book Award for nonfiction in 2009 and has been translated into eight languages. His 2003 memoir West of Kabul, East of New York was selected as San Francisco's One City One Book pick for 2008. Ansary also wrote The Widow's Husband, a historical novel, numerous nonfiction children's books, and several textbooks. including a 12-book series, Holiday Histories, and the 8-book series Native Americans. Ansary ran the San Francisco Francisco Writer's Workshop for 22 years and has taught memoir writing workshops in Portland, San Francisco, and Puerto Vallerto, Mexico. His travels have taken him to 45 of the fifty states, Mexico, Europe, North Africa, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. In 2001, the day after 9/11, he wrote an email about the event to 20 of his friends, which became the first viral phenomenon of the Internet age: it was read by tens of millions around the globe within the week. Today he lives with his wife in San Francisco, California, where he hosts a Memoir Pool, a blog devoted to the art of the real-life story. His two daughters live in Brooklyn. Elina Ansary studied fine arts at the Pratt Institute. Her work has been exhibited at galleries in San Francisco and New York, and her murals can be seen in various Brooklyn bars and restaurants. She is currently an apprentice scenic painter at the Juilliard School.
