GLAMOUR -AFGHANISTAN AND- GHOSTS : BOOK REVIEW

'' The Finest Hotel in Kabul : A People's History of Afghanistan." By Lyse Doucet.

After an intense 20-year relationship, America and the West have largely ghosted Afghanistan. As the Taliban regime has implemented gender apartheid, as Afghans have endured hunger and earthquakes and Internet blackouts, we've averted our gaze from the suffering.

To her credit, Lyse Doucet, the BBC's chief international correspondent, who has been reporting from the country since 1988, hasn't wavered in her attachment in '' The Finest Hotel in Kabul,'' she's made an uneven but ultimately compelling attempt to provide a ''people's history'' of the country through the story of one building, The Intercontinental hotel in Kabul.

The Inter-Con, as it continued to be known long after the chain that lent its name severed ties, but was originally a five-star accommodation built by the British in the late 1960s on a hill at the edge of the city.

From the start it was meant for foreigners and the Afghan elite, ordinary Kabulis rarely passed through its doors, except to work.

In the opening chapters, Doucet details its glamorous early years while telling the story of the employees who made it run, and, she says, found a second home there.

The pace here often feels slow, the detail about both the hotel and the author's journalistic challenges excessive and the prose occasionally prone to what sounds like TV-speak [ '' he knew a thing or two about diplomatic derring-do'' ].

She also makes the distracting choice to refer to herself in the third person.

Doucet does have an eye for the black comedy of successive regimes assuming control of both country and hotel.

In 1973, the hotel staff takes down the King's portrait after he is deposed, then in the succeeding three decades does the same for a series of presidents and commanders, all of them exiled or executed.

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a dozen mujahedeen squeeze, with their rifles and rocket launchers, into the hotel's unfamiliar revolving door, only to smash it in frustration.

The World Students Society thanks Amy Waldman.