At an excavation in Iran, he and Coon discovered skeletal remains that helped debunk the theory, dominant in archaeology at the time, that humanity’s origins lay in the Far East. Dupree is known for going anywhere she likes and for despising fortification. The Harvard archaeologist Carleton Coon took Dupree under his wing. The guidebook’s author’s name was Nancy Hatch Dupree. They moved into Dean’s, a Victorian hotel, a hangout for people with information about what was happening in Afghanistan. So these three or four people on the stage, they each had a radio. Daddy’s Head, they liked to think, was opening its vault of secrets. Since Dupree was relying on the Afghan government to pay for much of it, she was also relying on the government to pay the workers who were supposed to be finishing it. They had given us so much.” She choked up. As a youth leader in the church, said Nancy—with the air of hagiography that characterizes much of her recollection of Louis—he invited a black boy to a service, and “when the church elders told him he couldn’t do that, he said, ‘Fuck you.’. Louis Dupree and were the only Americans in Kabul who could match one another cocktail for cocktail and tale for tale, and by the mid-1960s they had become good friends. I won this book in a Goodreads contest. A month after the coup, Dupree wrote a letter to The New York Times emphasizing the nationalist character of Taraki’s regime. The next year the Soviet Union invaded. “He’s got the spirit. Aged but eager. Dupree photographed it with a high-speed camera. My favorites were The Sinking of the Bounty, When We Are Called To Part, 52 Blue and the title piece. In 1944, he joined the Army, trained as a paratrooper, and was dispatched to the Pacific, where his most challenging mission, according to stories he would later tell, found him dropping behind enemy lines in the Philippines to recruit Bontoc Igorot natives to fight the Japanese. “This poor little fella,” she said as we walked by him. More recently, while ordering lumber for a construction project, Nancy ran up against a moratorium on logging that Hamid Karzai had instated. “You name them, he seemed to know them.”, More than any other foreigner, Dupree knew Afghans, all kinds of Afghans; he was as charmed by goatherds as he was by the royal family. They all had something to teach him, he felt. It had been obvious enough to me, watching it at work, that her organization was inefficient. It’s higgledy-piggledy.”. Some great short stories and some not so great. So he’d moved them into a locked office. The Head is carved into a limestone pebble two and a half inches high by one and a quarter inches wide. “A good talker, a good dancer, a good drinker—drinking especially.” And Dupree, who had a connection at customs and brought in liquor by the crate, seemed “impervious to alcohol.” Wolfe relished drinking martinis with Dupree and listening to stories of the Bontoc headhunters. It was a beautiful building. “One kicked him in the balls and the other one hit him in the stomach.” Then a guard brought in an electrical device with wires hanging out of it, “wiggling like the tentacles of a Medusa trying to escape.” The cellmate “just went to pieces.”, Through it all, Dupree managed to keep his sense of humor. “An amazing troupe of people would come by: Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Afghans,” the archaeologist Rick Davis remembered. In this society, you get somebody trained and then the father says, ‘We’re moving from Peshawar to Islamabad,’ and off they go. The Atavist Magazine, Proudly powered by WordPress. He’d been surrounded by spies of one type or another for much of his life. “So you’re leaving us?” she said to him in a plaintive voice. Winner of the 2015 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. That was how Louis Dupree talked—to Times writers, to fellow archeologists, presidents, statesmen, interrogators, spies. Brooke Jarvis' piece about the last days of a leper colony in Hawai. Many Afghans regard the period as the high point of their history. “Though the fact that he was in the Foreign Service was such a draw for her. The tanks have been replaced by a lot of healthy-looking trees, and fewer, less-healthy-looking buildings. Louis knew the autocratic but generous-spirited Daoud as well as any foreigner did. In the acknowledgements she wrote, “From my husband, Louis Dupree, I draw a constant charge of excitement and enthusiasm for this land and its people. Although Louis had taken up a professorship at Duke University, he and Nancy never entertained the thought of moving permanently to North Carolina. It didn’t catch me then and it doesn’t catch me now. We passed a cinderblock sprawl that had been a meadow, the site of a cavalry battle in the First Anglo-Afghan war, in the early 1840s. All of it at the expense of the American taxpayer, America’s reputation, and, worst of all, everyday Afghans, the people whom Dupree has been trying to help for most of her adult life. “Hasps had been unscrewed and locks ripped off steel storage boxes, and drawers and crates had been methodically emptied onto the floor.” It was rumored that thieves were using her guidebook to the museum to value stolen pieces. Louis, of course, knew the Marxist cabal well, including the new president, Nur Mohammed Taraki, a sadistic KGB provocateur of long standing. What happened next is still obscured by mystery and rumor. After some gentle cajoling from Wafa and the others, Dupree agreed on potential vendors. I picked the book up in Powell's in Portland, Oregon. This book is an anthology of articles that appeared in the online magazine “The Atavist.” I’d never heard of it before I picked up the book, but it turned out I was familiar with some of the editor’s other work: his podcast “Longform” in which he interviews journalists about their craft. The fascinating and original writing in Love and Ruin demonstrates why The Atavist has become the leader in publishing “remarkable . Embassies opened. Nancy and Annie Dupree, Louis’s wife, rebuffed any number of offers. Everyone laughed, and she was off. An official recognized Dupree and, forgetting himself for a moment, shook his hand. Now, Love and Ruin brings ten of the magazine's most astonishing stories into print for the first time. Dark episodes in recent Afghan history originated on the university campus. Louis and Nancy drove over the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, where other expatriate and Afghan friends who’d made it out were gathering. I knew little of Gellhorn before reading the book, but liked her character quite a bit in the story. Wafa, her executive director, admitted to me that the organization was, indeed, broke. “The photo on the front page was of the new Afghan flag being raised in Kabul. “” he asked. This being the 1960s, that scene was characterized not only by heavy boozing but by adultery. Everything in it reminds her of Afghanistan’s past, of her past, of Louis. At first they fought with 19th-century muskets and WWII-era Lee Enfield rifles and made bullets by hand from spent shell casings. It's hard to choose a favorite out of the collection, but When We Are Called to Part by Brooke Jarvis is certainly one of the top stories. “You’ve seen his book?” she asked me one day. 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