The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan
An uneven but ultimately compelling attempt to provide a 'people’s history' of the country ... The pace here often feels slow, the detail about both the hotel and the author’s journalistic challenges excessive and the prose occasionally prone to what sounds like TV-speak ... [Doucet] also makes the distracting choice to refer to herself in the third person ... Doucet does have an eye for the black comedy of successive regimes assuming control of both country and hotel ... For a good chunk of the book, I questioned Doucet’s choice to tell the country’s story through this particular place ... But at some point, the book rises — or falls — into the more representative history Doucet aims for ... And a somewhat plodding, occasionally frothy book becomes both riveting and sad ... Doucet’s long focus pays off ... Deeply felt.
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Charming and often surprising ... Doucet succeeds in making the hotel an oddly successful frame for a sweeping social history of Afghanistan over the last half century and a moving symbol of its remarkable ability to endure whatever horrors fate has thrown at it ... What sustains the book is Doucet’s focus on the ordinary Afghans who keep the place going ... In Doucet, and her witty, observant and sometimes heartbreaking book, they have found a worthy chronicler.
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Doucet’s telling is far from grim. It’s full of warmth, wit, and a lovely eye for the human stories that make the hotel not just a monument to tragedy, but also love and resilience ... This is the book about an Afghanistan I never knew that I always wanted to read ... What Doucet achieves is both powerful and charming at the same time. The Finest Hotel in Kabul is a meditation on memory, resilience, and the strange intimacy of public spaces.
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