Praise for Making Friends Among the Taliban

Now Featured in the Patheos Book Club
Making Friends Among the Taliban
A Peacemaker's Journey in Afghanistan
By Jonathan P. Larson

What People Are Saying

"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."
—Publishers Weekly, September 10, 2012

"The more people find moral meaning in telling the stories of Dan Terry's work, the better they are equipped to promote peace. I suspect Dan would not want us to remember him as a saint. But . . . we can certainly remember him as a hero of the age."
—Michael Semple, leading practitioner of conflict resolution in Afghanistan and South Asia; from the foreword

"Dan Terry sought the back seat in tea shops across Afghanistan to practice 'small talk as peacemaking,' insisting on the good in all people. A powerful and vivid tribute."
—Doug Pritchard, former co-director, Christian Peacemaker Teams

"Dan Terry proved that even the most desperate circumstances can yield hope and understanding. Jonathan Larson pays tribute to a remarkable man, recounting episodes that are as truly improbable as they are inspiring."
—Stephen Alter, author of Amritsar to Lahore: Crossing the India-Pakistan Border