Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier (Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies)
"Making a virtue of necessity is perhaps the most important lesson an ethnographer has to learn, and David Edwards has learned it brilliantly. Unable to pursue his planned research in Afghanistan due to the ongoing warfare there, he was obliged to remain in the refugee camps of Pakistan. There, dispossessed Afghan men, seeking to retain some purchase on their past, told stories of great heroes and epic battle of the last century. Edwards provided an audience for these narratives and uses them as the centerpiece for his striking portrait of this much brutalized society. . . . The whole book is well structured, gracefully written, and convincingly done. I envy Edwards's ability to convey the central ethical options of Pashtun men so skillfully. . . . In this fine book David Edwards has raised disturbing and important questions about the very nature of culture and of morality."--"American Anthropologist