In a question-and-answer session Oct. 13, Hosseini encouraged students to travel the world to better understand how events around the globe impact their lives at home.
Hosseini, a native of Afghanistan, is the author of two bestselling novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. A Thousand Splendid Suns was Elon’s Common Reading selection for 2009-2010.
Hosseini said no foreign nation has ever emerged victorious from war in Afghanistan and that the best course of action for the United States would be to treat its efforts there not so much as a war on terror – but as a “war on poverty.”
About half the nation lives on less than $1 a day, he said, and clean water is inaccessible to swaths of the population.
“When people have a semblance of a job, when they have a roof over their head, when there’s some water on the table, some bread, a sense of predictability to their life, maybe there’s a school they can send their kids to, then they’re much less likely to be influenced, to be persuaded, by the extremists,” he said.
As technology makes the world smaller, he said, it’s imperative for young people to travel to better understand events on the world stage.
“The days when we lived in a world where what happens halfway across the globe didn’t affect us, those days are over,” he said. “Technology has changed everything, and that has been both a blessing and a curse. In a way we live in a much, much smaller world. That means that we have to learn about each other, because what happens across the ocean will boomerang and affect us.”
Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965, the son of a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and a Farsi and history teacher at a large high school. The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States after a communist coup overthrew the government in 1980.
Hosseini earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Santa Clara University in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego’s School of Medicine, where he earned a medical degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.
While in medical practice, Hosseini began writing The Kite Runner, which was published in 2003. In 2006 he was named a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. A Thousand Splendid Suns was published in May 2007.
The author was introduced by Aldona Wos, a friend of the university and former U.S. ambassador to Estonia. Like Hosseini, Wos was an immigrant to the United States and arrived in the country as a child.