An important story for our era: How the American Dream went wrong for two immigr
ants, and the nightmare that resulted.
The facts of the tragedy are establishe
d: On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs fashioned from pressure cookers explode
d near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding
264 others. The elder of the brothers suspected of committing this atrocity, Ta
merlan Tsarnaev, died in the ensuing manhunt; Dzhokhar will stand trial in Janua
ry 2015. What we don't know is why. How did such a nightmare come to pass?
Thi
s is a probing and powerful story of dislocation, and the longing for clarity an
d identity that can reach the point of combustion. Bestselling Russian-American
author Masha Gessen is uniquely endowed with the background, access, and talent
to tell it. She explains who the brothers were and how they came to do what they
appear to have done. From their displaced beginnings, as descendants of ethnic
Chechens deported to Central Asia in the Stalin era, Gessen follows them as they
are displaced again, from strife-ridden Kyrgyzstan to war-torn Dagestan, and th
en, as emigres to the United States, into an utterly disorienting new world. Mos
t crucially, she reconstructs the struggle between assimilation and alienation t
hat ensued for each of the brothers, fueling their apparent metamorphosis into a
new breed of homegrown terrorist, with their feet on American soil but their lo
yalties elsewhere--a split in identity that seems to have incubated a deadly sen
se of mission. Like Dave Cullen's "Columbine," this will be the enduring account
of an indelible tragedy.
