NHTI Professor Michael Moffett and noted Hollywood actor and acclaimed Afghan-American military interpreter Fahim Fazli will be featured at a book-signing event at Gibson’s Bookstore on Thursday, Aug. 7 at 7 p.m. Their book is entitled Fahim Speaks: A Warrior-Actor’s Odyssey from Afghanistan to Hollywood and Back.
The book chronicles Fazli’s life journey, to include his escape from Communist-dominated Afghanistan in 1983, his years as a refugee, coming to America, becoming a Hollywood actor, and then returning to Afghanistan with the Marines.
Published by Warriors Publishing Group, Fahim Speaks won a Gold Medal for Top Biography from the Military Writers Association of America. Fahim Speaks was also nominated for “Book-of-the-Year” with the Oral History Association of America and for the prestigious General Wallace M. Greene, Jr. Award for distinguished non-fiction dealing with U.S. Marines.
The book was co-authored by Fazli and Moffett (LtCol, USMC, ret). The two met in the Marine Corps’ area of operations in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010. A reserve infantry officer, Moffett was in-country as a field historian for Marine Corps University. Fazli was so effective as a translator, bringing together Americans and Afghans, that the Taliban put a price on his head.
Dedicated to his mother and to all the women of the world, Fahim Speaks is an adventure story, a love story, a Hollywood story, and a war story. It’s an inspiring account of perseverance and patriotism – and of the special love that one man developed for his adopted country and for the United States Marine Corps.
Fazli’s Hollywood experiences include two of the Iron Man movies as well as “ARGO,” which won Academy Award for “Best Picture” in 2013. He just returned from Morocco, where he had a role in the filming of “Rock the Kasbah” with Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Zooey Deschanel, and Kate Hudson. Fazli can be seen in “Fort Bliss” with Michelle Monaghan, due out in September, and in Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” with Bradley Cooper, which is tentatively slated for a November release.
A California screenwriter is presently working on a movie script proposal based on Fahim Speaks.
