author
Frank A. Martin
A firsthand witness to life in Kabul under two Afghan amirs, he wrote with the eye of an engineer and the instincts of a traveler. His best-known book opens a rare window onto Afghanistan at the turn of the 20th century.
1 Audiobook
Under the absolute Amir
by Frank A. Martin
About the author
Little is firmly documented online about Frank A. Martin beyond the book itself, but reliable library and book records describe him as an engineer who served for eight years as engineer-in-chief to the Afghan rulers Abdur Rahman Khan and Habibullah Khan.
His best-known work, Under the Absolute Amir (1907), draws on those years in Kabul and combines memoir, travel writing, and observation. Contemporary catalog descriptions note that the book gives a first-hand account of everyday life, politics, customs, and infrastructure in Afghanistan from a European observer's point of view.
Because so few biographical sources are easy to confirm, the safest picture is a simple one: Martin was a technical expert whose unusual posting gave him material for a vivid historical narrative that still attracts readers interested in Afghanistan, empire, and eyewitness accounts from the early 1900s.