24 squares and designs in a flower garden of color, motifs and patterning.

The Great American Aran Afghan booklet features 24 squares by twenty-four knitters. Combine 20 squares of your choice for the throw and pair the additional four into accent pillows. All the information you'll need to knit The Great American Aran Afghan is included in this convenient booklet.

Whether they are called blankets or throws, warm and colorful afghans are an ever popular item for the home and project for knitters, and this guide takes knitters from the basics of creating afghan squares through the mechanics of laying out those squares in a design to the final product. Four project patterns—two that combine texture and color, one with cables, and one for kids—are included. Step-by-step illustrations are featured for stitches such as intarsia, duplicate stitch, cable and twist stitches, modular, entrelac, and two-color stranding. Both written and charted pattern directions, finishing hints, and border treatments are also provided. Since squares are made one at a time, crafters can easily transport projects and switch up designs any time.

Provides patterns and instructions for a variety of afghans, including picture afghans, and demonstrates basic stitches

A sharp and arresting people's-eye view of real life in Afghanistan after the Taliban Soon after the bombing of Kabul ceased, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city, determined to bring help where her country had brought destruction. Here is her trenchant report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Working among the multitude of impoverished war widows, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, and investigating the city's prison for women, Jones enters a large community of female outcasts: runaway child brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape. In the streets and markets, she hears the Afghan view of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban, and learns that regarding women as less than human is the norm, not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked—by Communists, Islamic fundamentalists, and the Western free marketeers—always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S promises and performance, between the new "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends so much upon our own.

“One of the most important books to come out of the Afghanistan war.”—Foreign Policy “A saga of courage and futility, of valor and error and heartbreak.”—Rick Atkinson, author of the Liberation Trilogy and The British Are Coming Of the many battlefields on which U.S. troops and intelligence operatives fought in Afghanistan, one remote corner of the country stands as a microcosm of the American campaign: the Pech and its tributary valleys in Kunar and Nuristan. The area’s rugged, steep terrain and thick forests made it a natural hiding spot for local insurgents and international terrorists alike, and it came to represent both the valor and futility of America’s two-decade-long Afghan war. Drawing on reporting trips, hundreds of interviews, and documentary research, Wesley Morgan reveals the history of the war in this iconic region, captures the culture and reality of the conflict through both American and Afghan eyes, and reports on the snowballing missteps—some kept secret from even the troops fighting there—that doomed the American mission. The Hardest Place is the story of one of the twenty-first century’s most unforgiving battlefields and a portrait of the American military that fought there.