My Forbidden Face: growing up under the Taliban; a young woman's story.

MY FORBIDDEN FACE: growing up under the Taliban; a young woman's story. Latifa. 2002. Read by Edita Brychta. 4 tapes. 6 hrs. Hyperion Audio, dist. by Time Warner Audio. 0-7868-6989-5. $25.98. Cardboard, plastic; content, reader notes. JSA *

Latifa--not her real name--was 16 years old when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan and banned women from all public life. Literally forbidden to show their faces, women left home only when wearing a head-to-toe veil with a little mesh area to see through; and accompanied by a male relative.

Latifa was a student, her mother a doctor; one sister a journalist, the other a flight attendant. Radio broadcasts delivered Taliban edicts forbidding women to wear lipstick, requiring a finer mesh in their veils, and more. The hardships to individual women and their families as well as the greater society were ignored. Latifa's mother treated women at her home until she ran out of supplies and became ill herself. Latifa and her parents escaped to Paris and were soon part of a general fatwa against anyone speaking against the Taliban. The remnant of the family was in Paris when the September 11, 2001 attack changed everything in Afghanistan as the Taliban rule was then to be settled with guns. The accented reading is smooth and slow, with only slight changes in inflection from time to time, conveying absolutely the chilling images.

Vivian E. Berg, Mandan, ND