Lost Decency: The Gilded Cages and the Search for Home

Name: Lost Decency: The Gilded Cages and the Search for Home
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Atta Arghandiwal

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A work of memory, exile, and moral history, Lost Decency connects Afghanistan's political rupture with its human cost. Through family memory, displacement, and the search for home, Atta asks what people carry when a country changes around them—and what dignity and responsibility can preserve after familiar structures are gone.

A 2012 Foreword INDIES finalist in Autobiography & Memoir and a 2013 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award finalist for the Bill Fisher Best First Book—Nonfiction.

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Afghanistan, Memory, and Moral Loss

Atta offers a lived account of Afghanistan before and after political rupture, and of the human consequences that continue long after public attention moves on. He connects national events with family memory, displacement, exile, and the difficult responsibility to tell the truth without turning suffering into spectacle. The conversation invites audiences to consider what history costs ordinary people and what memory asks of those who survive it.

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