The Bactra Review   Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response

---

Two moving books by Western novelists, recounting their fruitless efforts to arouse public interest in the plight of Afghanistan, are Doris Lessing's The Wind Blows Away Our Words (NY: Vintage, 1987) and William T. Vollmann, An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992). Lessing's chapter on ``The Strange Case of the Western Conscience'' is particularly noteworthy.