With One Fool Left in the World, No One is Stranded

About the Book

This book charts the life of two young American teachers immersed in an Afghan village, and later in Kabul, from 1973-1976, before the onset of decades of conflict. In this turn back to the memories coded and buried in those years, and in the flashes to more recent events and reflections, the book portrays stories, scenes, people and realities long lost. In the minute particulars and in the large, political and cultural strokes which made up that complex country of hospitable people who shaped the writer's life in unpredictable ways, one finds the seeds which grew to shape a country, a region, an endless war, and which now impact a new millennium.

About the Author

Frances Garrett Connell currently teaches for the University of Maryland University College. Since her years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan, she has raised three amazing and world-wise sons, navigated 30 years of marriage to Washington attorney Tom Connell, and worked as a community volunteer in school, church and social service programs. She taught in secondary and adult education programs and at five colleges and universities; directed ESL, refugee resettlement, hunger education, and US repatriation programs; and wrote a dissertation on “Literacy and its Indigenous Forms in a Traditional Afghan Village“ for her doctorate at Columbia. Author or editor of eleven other books, several of them as part of her A Reminiscence Sing oral and family history endeavors and including compilations of work by two brothers(John and David mentioned in this journal) and a Tibetan sister-in law (wife of brother Danny who had visited in 1976), she has published poetry and essays in 27 magazines. Most recently, she moved from a spacious, woodsy home in Silver Spring, MD to a tiny studio in Washington Heights (NYC) with a glimpse of the Hudson, and became the grandmother to Gabriel Dylan Hu Connell (b. Oct. 7, 2012).