The Brothers - Masha Gessen.epub

On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston marathon, killing three people and wounding more than 264 others. In the ensuing manhunt, Tamerlan Tsarnaev died, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, was captured and ultimately charged on thirty federal counts. Yet long after the bombings and the terror they sowed, after all the testimony and debate, what we still haven’t learned is why. Why did the American Dream go so wrong for two immigrants? How did such a nightmare come to pass?

Acclaimed Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen is uniquely endowed with the background, access, and talents to tell the full story. An immigrant herself, who came to the Boston area with her family as a teenager, she returned to the former Soviet Union in her early twenties and covered firsthand the transformations that were wracking her homeland and its neighboring regions. It is there that the history of the Tsarnaev brothers truly begins, as descendants of ethnic Chechens deported to Central Asia in the Stalin era. Gessen follows the family in their futile attempts to make a life for themselves in one war-torn locale after another and then, as new émigrés, in the looking-glass, utterly disorienting world of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most crucially, she reconstructs the struggle between assimilation and alienation that ensued for each of the brothers, incubating a deadly sense of mission. And she traces how such a split in identity can fuel the metamorphosis into a new breed of homegrown terrorist, with feet on American soil but sense of self elsewhere.


PRAISE

“Remarkable… reminiscent of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower… Rather than the story of two lone-wolf jihadists, determined to wage war on their adopted country, the marathon bombing becomes a saga of both the Tsarnaev family and contemporary U.S. culture, in which all too often terror provokes an unreasonable response…For Gessen, the issue is not guilt or innocence…more essential is what the Tsarnaevs and their story tells us about who we have become. That she makes the case with grace and passion, while also basing it on rigorous reporting, is the triumph of the book”
—Los Angeles Times

“A powerfully compelling portrait… Gessen is uniquely suited to tell the Tsarnaev story: She moved to Boston as a teenage Russian immigrant herself, and, as a result, her observations about what immigrants experience carry specific gravity…No book could ever fully explain why someone would choose to murder innocent people, but Gessen comes as close as we’ll ever get. Much as Truman Capote did in his classic “In Cold Blood,” Gessen offers compassion for those whose acts are most contemptible, and her explanation of what happened is as complex and as simple as it is to be human. And that is truly frightening.”
—Chicago Tribune

“A Russian-speaking immigrant in Boston, journalist Masha Gessen might be uniquely qualified to investigate Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In The Brothers, she writes with sophistication and nuance about their family’s complicated, nomadic existence… an enthralling and illuminating read.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune, Fave of the Week

“This is a story that no one wanted to hear in the days and months after the bombing…Many Americans still may not care to hear it, but that would be too bad, because [The Brothers] is one of the best books I’ve ever read about terrorism and the immigrant experience in America… part social history, part travelog (she traversed the Caucasus and Central Asia while reporting it), and part forensic on family and cultural dysfunction…Gessen wanders among these people, and approaches them with empathy and dark wit… a student of state and stateless terror, [she] is excellent on the varieties of fear it engenders.”
—Newsweek

“Gessen…compels us to see the story as part of a much bigger global conflict…[and] is an ideal person to contextualize much of this story, even if her conclusions make us uncomfortable…Most importantly…The Brothers relentlessly observes an overreach of power in response to the bombings…an often painful account of our system’s moral failings, the ways in which we’re inhospitable to those seeking asylum on our shores, and the ways our law enforcement acts in a manner as draconian as law enforcement was in the strife-torn places they fled. That may not be the story we’re looking for, but it is a story we very much need.”
—Flavorwire

“Two parts forensic anthropology, one part activism, The Brothers is a forceful…passionate exploration of the events that preceded and followed the [Boston Marathon bombing]… Gessen is at her best when she takes the reader through the Tsarnaevs’ wildly complicated social history… The origins of their story, itself dizzyingly complex, sets the stage for our understanding of the permanent state of exile and cultural confusion the Tsarnaev clan seemed to endure.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“[Gessen’s] own background…make her an ideal author for this story…her knowledge of Soviet and Russian history, and her reporting on the ground in Dagestan, Kyrgyzstan and Chechnya, lend a resonance and weight … to the Tsarnaev family’s peregrinations in that region…Gessen explains how the history of Chechnya — and the radicalism that took root there — might have affected family members, and she also brings an understanding of the dislocations often faced by immigrants to her account.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times