Praise for Manan Ahmed's "Where the Wild Frontiers Are"

Manan Ahmed 's latest book Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination has grabbed the attention of prominent authors, bloggers and academics.  Ahmed's biting critique of America's false image of Pakistan has been described as a "canny insurgency of the keyboard" and a "rare combination of erudition, dark humor, and clarity of thought."  
Read what they have to say:

From Juan Cole, University of Michigan and author, Engaging the Muslim World: "Manan Ahmad's essays on American intervention in the Muslim world are cantankerous, literate, biting, and contrarian. He argues back against the poobahs of superpower arrogance. He demolishes shibboleths. He peers into the rotten foundations of the Neoconservative castles in the sky and finds them crumbling in the jaws of the termites of fallacy. His is a canny insurgency of the keyboard and the kilobytes. Like the unleavened bread in which Indian rebels hid their encrypted communications during the Great Rebellion of 1857, Ahmad's columns disguise a lethally witty response to the casual sadism of empire.

From Mohammed Hanif, author, A Case of Exploding Mangoes: "The "Chapati Mystery" blog has provided some of the most well written and historically aware commentaries on the War on Terror over recent years. It has also emerged as a refreshing alternative to the opinion pages in the mainstream media. Manan's posts are sometimes angry, sometimes funny, but always engaging. He can be combative and elegant in the same sentence. I urge any one who has an opinion on Pakistan, (and who doesn't?) to read this. I also wish this book was one thousand pages long!”

From Myra Macdonald, senior Reuters journalist, blogger, author of Heights of Madness, a book about the Siachen war: "If you read only one book about Pakistan this year, read this. A rare combination of erudition, dark humor, and clarity of thought, strips bare the prejudices which distort America's view of Pakistan. This is not the country of the U.S. imagination—a near-failed state where bearded fanatics and mad mullahs burn the American flag while darkly plotting to seize control of the nuclear bombs. Manan Ahmed's Pakistan is a diverse and dynamic country with a rich past and promising future. Its history is shaped by Islam, by British colonial rule and, more recently, by American support for its military dictators. Its future lies in democracy. But this book is not only about Pakistan. It is also about the United States, and its peculiar blindness to the way it slips into the old habits of British colonial thinking. Creating a Pakistan in its imagination very different from reality, it convinces itself that without its firm guidance the country would descend into chaos. Despite its professed commitment to democracy, America has never really learned to trust “the masses” of Pakistan or indeed of other Muslim countries. This book should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in understanding why the United States has repeatedly failed to build an effective relationship with Pakistan.”