Making Friends Among the Taliban: A Peacemaker’s Journey in Afghanistan

First-time author Larson is compelled to tell the story of the man who had been his best man: Dan Terry. The son of American Methodist missionaries, Terry had been raised in northern India and was familiar with the Hindu Kush mountain range between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For more than 40 years—through the Soviet invasion, Taliban takeover, and NATO-led invasion—Terry traveled the Afghan highlands ”making friends,” becoming a “trusted guide... toward a more peaceable country.” It is doubtful that anyone other than Terry’s childhood friend Larson could have captured the nuances, adventure, faith undertones, and raw beauty of Terry’s story. Larson spins an elegant and exhilarating tale of heroism, love, recklessness, and altruism played out against one of the world’s oldest cultures and the longest-running U.S. war. In 2010, Terry’s execution-style murder, along with that of nine other aid workers as they returned to Kabul from a medical mission, made international news. While reminiscent of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, Larson’s look at an American in Afghanistan takes the reader beyond any facile definitions of enemy into a territory of dangerous love, where peace, sturdy and resilient, can neither be built nor dismantled at the point of a gun. (Oct. 19)