Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil
DEBORAH RODRIGUEZ. Random, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6559-3
A
Michigan hairdresser trying to escape her abusive husband, Rodriquez
volunteers for disaster relief training in 2001- and winds up in Afghanistan
after the fall of the Taliban. Traveling with a team of doctors and nurses,
she wonders how her skills can possibly be of help, until her introduction
at a meeting of foreign aid workers results in wild applause. “There isn’t a
decent haircut within a day’s drive of Kabul,” one woman tells her, as
Rodriquez is mobbed with requests. She reads the situation as the coiffure
equivalent of the Chinese proverb about teaching a man to catch his own
fish. With grants and donated products, she starts a school to teach Afghani
women hairstyling, giving them a space free from the control of men. This
lively memoir is full of darkly funny moments- a customer who had never seen
a blow dryer thinks it’s a gun and runs screaming from the salon chair-and
the humor leavens the horror stories about life in the war-torn land. A
dishy but substantial read.