Advanced Junior English
May 17th, 2013
Lit Spec: Khaled Hosseini With the guns blazing and bombs exploding, Khaled Hosseini takes the world to Afghanistan to experience the drama, passion, and rich heritage that the troubled country holds. In the year 2003, Hosseini wrote The Kite Runner, which in time turned out to be a best seller and sold over thirty-eight million copies worldwide. Four years later, in 2007, Hosseini followed up with The Kite Runner, and wrote the sequel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Just as his first master piece, A Thousand Splendid Suns turned into a huge success as well. The book sold over twenty-five million copies worldwide and received numerous amounts of awards just as his first did. Khaled Hosseini is a post 9/11 author whose use of life changing events emotionally and historically throughout his first book The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, help depict the troublesome issues that involve; The oppression on the female society, historical mishaps, and friendship. Although the issues were fragile topics, he helped identify the rich culture of the Afghan people through the views of Afghan women, children, and men. Khaled Hosseini was born on March 4th, 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan. When Hosseini turned five years old, his family and he moved to Iran in order for his father to continue working for the Embassy of Afghanistan, located in Tehran. In the year of 1976, when Khaled turned eleven, his father’s job changed once again, and as before, they moved, but this time to Paris, France. While in France, he obtained a relationship with an Afghan boy by the name of Hossein Khan. He taught Khan to read and also write. These relationships that he had, helped sculpt the literary spectacle The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini used personal experiences from the friendship he had with Khan, while also using his strong Hazara Afghan personality that he remembered so fondly as a child in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Khaled and his family were unsteady about returning to Afghanistan, mainly because of the Soviet invasion of Iran in 1980, and the governmental party changing to the PDPA communist party. When Hosseini turned fifteen in 1980, his family made the dramatic decision to move to a permanent location to the United States of America, in San Jose, California. While there, Hosseini attended high school and graduated in 1984. After high school, he applied for college and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he received his degree in biology in 1988 and his degree in internal medicine in 1996 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He practiced medicine for 10 years, and released his first book The Kite Runner in 2003. He eventually got married and moved to northern California in 2004 with his wife, Roya, and his two children Harris and Farah. He continued to write, and released his second book, and sequel to The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2007. Hosseini’s inspiration for writing A Thousand Splendid Suns, had much to do with the same issues that were addressed in his first book The Kite Runner, except this time, instead of giving a childhood point of view of Afghanistan, he gave the female perspective, which received many renowned awards and reviews. Khaled is now 48, and is currently taking a break from writing and helping with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, located in California. Throughout the course of history, women’s rights have been questioned, debated, and taken away in all cultures and countries including, debatably, the greatest country ever established, the United States of America. Eventually, most countries realized how important women were to work force, financial efforts, and national defense, and lifted the women’s oppressive laws. The oppression of women in Afghanistan began in 1890, and although the efforts of president Khan were great, the Communist and Taliban took over and made the oppression even greater. Even
