<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  John Jude Parish, the lanky 18- year-old North Carolinian skate and surfboarding spiritual seeker in Pearl Abraham&amp;#039;s American Taliban (Random House), is an impressive fictive conjuring of the story of John Walker Lindh. Lindh, currently doing 20 years in jail for serving in the Taliban, was the young Californian who, months after 9/11, emerged naked, emaciated, and bleeding from Afghanistan and was forever seared into our collective imagination as the first homegrown terrorist of the Al Qaeda era.  While the physical resemblance between Parish and Lindh may be deliberate, Abraham sets her own political, philosophical, regional, and familial agenda to draw the reader into Parish&amp;#039;s increasingly secretive, isolated, and radicalized world. &amp;quot;When he wasn&amp;#039;t on water,&amp;quot; the Brown University\u2013deferring teen &amp;quot;lived on wheels. He believed in continuous adaptation.&amp;quot; He worships Dylan and Marley, Emerson, Whitman, and Hegel and fervently studies world religions.  While recuperating from a skateboarding injury, Parish gets caught up in a new Internet relationship. Before he&amp;#039;s off crutches, he moves to Brooklyn, where he meets and falls in love with his chat-room friend Noor, whose family is traditional Muslim.  Parish&amp;#039;s journey to Pakistan in May 2001 accelerates his submersion in militant Islam, placing him in an all-male world of indoctrination and cutting him off from family and friends. Eventually, the 6&amp;#039; former skater-surfer teen intellectual who &amp;quot;made it a rule not to walk on terra firma&amp;quot; disappears.  It&amp;#039;s a heart- and mind-provoking tale that Abraham, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew, has fashioned with nerve, verve, and righteous vigor. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a10998/dude-of-a-different-god-american-taliban-438169/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=ELM&link=-SMT-ELM>