Reddit Reddit reviews The Places In Between

We found 9 Reddit comments about The Places In Between. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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9 Reddit comments about The Places In Between:

u/CanuckPanda · 65 pointsr/woahdude

It's a large part of many desert and steppe societies (basically those that live in harsh and unforgiving climates: Inuits, Samis, and other Arctic peoples can be included here) to provide some bare minimum of sustenance and safety to travellers.

In a world where everyone historically (and still do in some modern places) lived a nomadic or semi-nomadic life, it was a basic politeness to provide these things to any traveller, as you may at any day find yourself in a similar position to theirs and having to rely on the same goodwill and custom that you would provide. You can trace some of these customs in places like Afghanistan, Iran, and North Africa to the proliferation of travelling scholars, monks, or other learned men in the Roman Christian period and later in the dar-al-Islam and Caliphate periods.

You can see evidence in this is a number of modern travel journals for contemporary sources. I'd recommend On the Trail of Genghis Khan, about Australian Tim Cope's travels by horseback from Mongolia to Ukraine, or The Places in Between, which covers Rory Stewart's 2002 solo trek across Afghanistan, where he spends nights with Taliban commanders (among others) in the beginning periods of the NATO intervention by relying on a knowledge of these kinds of customs and traditions. They're not scholarly articles by any means, but they provide a modern view of how these customs and traditions still shape contemporary interactions in these places.

u/Newtothisredditbiz · 27 pointsr/journalismjobs

> How do I pitch this kind of story to an editor?

You don't.

Not until you've a) proven you can deliver fantastic, expertly written stories; and b) done something so extraordinary in your life that readers would be more interested in you than the fascinating people editors normally want their writers to cover — world leaders, movie stars, disease-curing scientists, and war heroes.

The way you do that is you work your way up the ranks covering more and more interesting people and topics until you've earned a reputation as top-notch feature writer. Then you dive into something so wild, people will pay to hear your tale of your experiences. Like when Rory Stewart walked alone across Afghanistan with a war going on all around him.

Hunter S. Thompson spent years working his way up from entry-level journalism jobs until he started writing magazine-style features. His "gonzo" career took off after he got a magazine assignment to cover the Hell's Angels. He spent nearly two years living with the gang and turned his experiences into a book.

Anthony Bourdain spent 20 years as a chef before writing a magazine article about the crazy, drug-fuelled shit that goes on in New York kitchens he worked in. That earned him a deal to turn the article into a best-selling book.

No one wants to read about a nobody who has done nothing.

Most of the time, journalists cover people who are far more fascinating than themselves. Even Pulitzer-winner Katherine Boo, who spent three years in an Indian slum researching her book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, doesn't say a word about herself in it, preferring to tell the stories of the slum inhabitants.

So start with writing profiles and features for your school paper or magazine. Maybe there's a prof on campus with a great back story who has made some big discovery. Write their stories with depth and colour. Move up to pitching stories to magazines about other amazing people doing incredible things. Transition into some travel writing to work on some more first-person stories. Or, as /u/CoolBeans17 points out, perhaps there are some alternative papers, city magazines, and blogs near you who will take more offbeat writing. I know few writers in my city who eventually earned semi-regular first-person feature spots in local publications. One started out doing quirky coverage of the local music scene, moved up to covering visiting bands, and now does his weird shit with big name acts. He's more interesting than a lot of musicians he covers, but he still doesn't try to outshine them.

Once you've developed nearly celebrity status and are on good terms with big-time editors, then you can call one of them up and say, "Hey, remember that awesome profile I did for you about that princess? She's asked me to lead her band of rebels when we try to blow up the Death Star. Can I give you 4,000 first-person words on it for the August issue when I get back?"

Then you get your literary agent to line up a book deal and movie rights.

Edit: some corrections.

u/jackzombie · 5 pointsr/books

I really enjoyed Three Cups of Tea, The Places In Between is another great read, this one is about a man who decides to walk across Afghanistan. A very eye opening account of how life is lived all over Afghanistan.

u/GiveMeNews · 5 pointsr/worldnews

Well, Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan right after the USA invaded in 2002. It is a good read.

http://www.amazon.com/Places-Between-Rory-Stewart/dp/0156031566

u/bourbonandacid · 2 pointsr/CampingandHiking

Hahaha, my pleasure! I've been reading up on language and culture in Afghanistan for a few years now, so I love it when people ask questions like yours. Afghanistan is one of the most interesting countries in the world when it comes to languages--Persian is an incredibly diverse language in this country, so much so that individual valleys (and even towns within them!) have their own dialects.

Hazaragi is especially interesting as it has a substantial inventory of Mongolic loanwords. This makes some sense when you see what the Hazara (3rd largest ethnic group in Afghanistan) look like. Linguists and historians speculate that the etymology of Hazara comes from the Persian word for 1,000 (hezar) as these folks are thought to be descendants of garrisons Ghengis Khan left in Bamyan after he wrecked shit there--his forces were divided into groups of 1,000 soldiers. Many Afghans are still salty about the devastation brought by the Mongols, a fact not helped by the fact that the majority of Hazara are Twelver Shia'a in a country more rooted in Sunni tradition--life ain't easy for the Hazara nowadays.

Besides Persian (an Indo-European language in the Indo-Iranian >> Western Iranian >> Southwestern Iranian family), Afghanistan has a shit ton of other languages. You mentioned Pashto, which is an Eastern Iranian language (so not mutually intelligible with Persian--no data to back this up, but I'd hazard the difference is like English and Norwegian or something like that). There's also the Pamiri languages (pretty sparse, also Eastern Iranian but of the northern subset), Balochi (Northwestern), and a whole independent group of Indo-Iranian languages called Nuristani, which is spoken in the very last area of Afghanistan to have been converted to Islam (late 18th century, I think!). Outside the Indo-Euro family, there are large groups of Turkic speakers, particularly Uzbek and Turkmen in the northern parts of the country, though there are some Kirghiz speakers way up in the Wakhan (the little panhandle stickin out to China).

Not on the list is Arabic--contrary to what a lot of people here in the West think, Arabic is spoken by hardly anybody in Afghanistan! It is a Semetic language of the Afro-Asiatic family and the last of its native speakers in this area of the world were Persianized quite some time ago (though Persian and Pashto both have a large number of Arabic loanwords on account of the Arab conquests and the spread of Islam). This is interesting as, especially in more conservative areas, there is still a massive reverence towards those who earn the title "Guardian" or Hafez (not the poet, though people love him too) by memorizing the Quran in its entirety, even if they don't understand 95% of what's being said in it! If you're into recent history in this area of the world, there's plenty of food for thought in how fundamentalism and extremism took such strong roots in a country that doesn't have the language or educational infrastructure in place to "home grow" such interpretations of religion.

Woah holy shit /rant. Didn't mean to type this much! Probably way more than you wanted to read! In the offchance it isn't, I recommend reading The Places In Between by Rory Stewart to wet your appetite. Homeboy walked across Afghanistan (Herat --> Kabul) in December 2001 and documented his adventure pretty well. No bias, no sugarcoating, no demonizing--he really does a good job showing the humanity of the place. If you're like me and want to dive more deeply into this fascinating country, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History is a bone dry but informationally rich textbook on the country. Land Beyond the River provides a great collection of well-researched anecdotes dealing with recent history in the areas directly north of Afghanistan and provides great light on how the Russian conquests of the Khanates and city-states to the north impacted Afghanistan, culminating in the Soviet invasion in the late 70s.

Alright, now I'm done.

u/Zizekesha · 2 pointsr/books

I'd recommend something from a journalist who's traveled in a specific region or regions (it usually goes hand in hand), it can give you a great perspective from the ground up.

Something like. http://www.amazon.com/The-Places-Between-Rory-Stewart/dp/0156031566

u/Klammo · 1 pointr/todayilearned

If anyone's interested in these walking adventures The Places In Between was a really good read.

u/taozero · 1 pointr/bookclub

I like stories of personal journeys/pilgrimages sort to speak. It that is your taste I would recommend:

  1. The Places In Between - Rory Stewart
  2. Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer
  3. Land of Lost Souls, My Life on the Streets - Cadillac Man
  4. Waking the Dead - John Eldredge

    Waking the Dead got me through a pretty tough stretch while the others keep me on the road.




u/[deleted] · 1 pointr/atheism

>stopping drug trafficing officially was a high priority in the war as you might know.

That is a high priority for the British and a lesser extent to the Americans. But really it isn't as high a priority as most people think.

>now production is on an all time high and the soldiers arent even allowed to interfere with the farmers

Going and burning some farmer's opium or marijuana cash crop would be pretty devastating for him, and not all farmers have a choice what they grow.

Also when you are fighting a counter insurgency and you go in and destroy a farmer''s livelihood then the various insurgents come in and give him a rifle and $100 and tell him to go shoot at NATO soldiers. Destroying the drug networks at a low level really does nothing but push the populace into the hands of the insurgency. It's counterproductive.

>they are not even allowed to gently convince farmers to change their mind there.

That's not actually true. They are working on various agricultural programs to replace the drug cultivation with other cash crops. Pomegranates is a major one as are grapes and melons. They are also working on trying to increase grain production to help increase food security and stability. Civil military teams and government departments are working together to help establish supply chains and export markets for Afghan crops. Pakistan and India are major markets right next door.


>some large fields have even been guarded by troops. thats corruption for me.

I haven't seen references to this, would you have any reliable ones? Some troops are really local village militias, designed to help deter intimidation by insurgents. Technically they are on the government payroll, but in reality they will do whatever is in the best interests of their village a lot of the time.

>anyway i really hope that the situation will get better over there. i really would like to visit some places there at some point.

I know a lot of people who have been there more times than myself. The situation started so bad that it was hard not to improve it. Security is getting better, but I won't go into specific details as I am sleepy and don't want to look up what is open source.

You may want to look up this book. It's a pretty good read and the next best thing to going there yourself.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Places-Between-Rory-Stewart/dp/0156031566

>would be cool if the people could be actually called free then and that they not just go right back into tyranny once the troops leave.

I'm sure there will still be an insurgency for some time. There are too many competing interests in the country. That being said you only need look at the Afghan forces now compared to how the were before. Afghan special forces, which include women, are now conducting the raids on IED cells and insurgent leaders. They are doing it without coalition troops on the ground. they don't have a first world army obviously, but what they do have is "Afghan good enough". They still need a lot of work in logistics, service support, repair, planning and sustainment but they have some decent troops. If you are a bunch of terrible soldiers it's a pretty Darwinian environment. I'm reasonably sure they'll muddle through.