Gessen did such a good job on her Putin bio, I was excited to find this more recent book on the Tsarnaev brothers.
Unlike other terrorists, they seemed to have too much going for them for them to commit murder as they did, Unfortunately this book is nowhere near the standard of the Putin book, The brothers have less going for them than it seemed, but so much is half reported its hard to know them,
The book started off well enough with Gessen, relating the culture and history from which the parents, Anzor and Zubeidat, emerged.
Gessen, having visited their several “home towns”, gives enough background so that you understand the horror of the previous generation and the dull and poor environment Anzor and Zubeidat left.
Anzor was Chechen but never lived in Checknya and Zubeidat was Avar, making them outsiders wherever they went,
Anzor and Zubeidat went to Boston on tourist visas and later applied for asylum, The did not need asylum witness how often family members return to their home region they were not political, They were opportunists who after drifting around the Russian Federation, through family connections, drifted to Cambridge, MA,
While they physically left the old world whichever country or quasicountry it might be they did not leave the old thinking behind.
Their oldest son would be a boxer, win awards and be rich and famous, Their daughters would marry Chechens no matter how unknown their character or ability to support a family might be, Their youngest son it seems they just didnt have time for him,
There is undoubtedly a lot more to know about this chaotic family than told here, Having had ayear relationship with the family, their landlady, Joanna Herlihy, surely had more to say than appears in this book.
Only one high school teacher is interviewed, none from Jahars college, Tamerlans wife who must have a story hardly gets a mention while there must bepages on the wife and mother in law of Ibragm Todashev who may or may not be part of the story.
Without saying the brothers are innocent, Gessen lays on the circumstantial evidence to exonerate them, She challenges the video of them dropping the bags with the bombs: it is so bad it took a long time to ID the brothers.
Did ignoring phoned in IDs, meant the FBI was in on it She challenges that the Tsarnaev's made the bomb, She focuses on the rough interrogation of the friends who threw out Jahars back pack and Kair Matanov who enjoyed shooting practice with Tamberlan.
She cites the number of FBI stings that entrap the vulnerable, There is a hard to follow thread on Tamerlans possibly being an FBI informant involving the triple Waltham murder and the killing of Ibragm Todashev.
There is a support group to “Free Jahar”, Michael Dukakis calls him. Many Chechens think he is innocent or maybe that what he did was a legitimate response to US foreign policy, Many, like his mother now living in Russia because she has a shoplifting charge in the US think he was set up.
These and other conspiracy theories comprise about/of the book,
The book ends with a vignette about a high school acquaintance of Tamerlan who spoke on CNN, It, like most of the book, seemed to be there to make a page count,
While there is a list of family, friends and acquaintances at the beginning, the layout makes it difficult to use.
There are no photos. There is no index. There are no footnotes, despite interviews and material from elsewhere,
After Gessens excellent and meaty book on Putin, this is a big disappointment, “So what if a kid dies, God will take care of him, ” Tamerlan Tsarnaev
“Terrorism has become a festering wound, It is an enemy of humanity, ” wrote the late former prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, On April,, two dysfunctional angry young brothers carried out the Boston marathon bombings, The oldest brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was a nonpracticing Muslim who only became an Islamist militant when his dream of becoming an Olympic boxer ended.
At the time of the attack he was twentysix years old, married, a father, unhappy and unemployed, The youngest brother, Dzhokhar,years old, was a puppy dog to the older brother, a kid who had
followed his older sibling and crossed the dark side.
This compelling book is the history of the Tsarnaev family, starting with the grandparents and the parents, The family had been of Chechen descent and wars/ persecution had forced them to relocate over and over, first from Chechnya, then to Kyrgyzstan, then to Dagestan, Russia, The parents and Dzhokhar came over to America infor ninety days on a tourist visa, when he was eight.
The older brother, Tamerlan stayed with his uncle and arrived two years later, The family claimed asylum and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Russian Author and Journalist, Masha Gessen has written an excellent book that was personal to her in a lot of ways.
She and her family were also exiles just like the Tsarnaev family were, when she just a teenager, Later she was literally forced out of Russia due to her books about Putin, Gessen believes that very little of the brothers terrorism activities were preplanned, She does not believe that the brothers received training from AlQueda or Isis but rather pulled off their own ghastly deeds in Boston by themselves with some help.
Unlike the media and law enforcement, Gessen does not buy they were radicalized but more that the brothers had no real sense of identity and were desperately looking for something “meaningful” to grasp onto.
They were failing terribly in their own personal lives, they were "nobodies" and this was something big and terrible to attach themselves to, it gave their lives meaning.
Tamerlain was killed during a shootout with the police after the bombing, Dzhokhar was captured, had a public trial and sentenced to death, “He put a shame he put a shame on our family, The Tsarni family! He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity!” said his Uncle Ruslan Tsarni, Four for a wellwritten book, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, Masha Gessen, this is a well known voyeur look atterrorists that didn't end up in Guantanamo and one of them actually caught alive, then went through, widely publisied U.
S judicial system. Being young, an idiot, easily lead, massive chips on their shoulders, all fatal ingredients, in building up in their minds a fantastic solution for Muslim injustice, that they were righteous crusaders and killing innocent morning runners and injuring hundreds more would give them paradise in eternity.
They were not even born or lived through any of that history, their relations, parents managed to get to the U.
S to try and start again, for a fresh start, these brothers went back, got involved, What a brutal world we inhabit, Two completely lost youths, I do kind of understand the why, If anything on one hand I got nothing from this, yet on the other hand, I got a whole lot.
It delved into some enormous social failures, The violent history between Chechens and Russians, The way investigating officers used dubious methods to link other family members,
Bit of preach so stop now, young at risk men falling into the lone wolf world of terrorism, we need better programs and very clever people to scoop up these easily in doctrinated people, steer them towards being useful members of society, it's not a perfect society but theres always hope it will be better.
borrowed from the library
Ok, I absolutely LOVED this audiobook!! I have been obsessed with the Boston bombing since it happened and I learned so many things from this book that I never would've known otherwise!
A lot of people questioned why Jahar I'm using the spelling of his nickname because I have no idea how to spell his birth name would follow his older brother Tamerlan so devoutly, even though Jahar didn't really have any passionate, radical ideologies of his own.
In Chechen culture, the eldest son RULES the family, Although the Tsarnaevs didn't always live in Chechnya, ethnically their parents were from there and that was how he raised his family.
They were displaced as a result of Operation Lentil! I can't remember all of the details, but it's a fascinating, yet horrific aspect of history to read up on!
NOT DONE YET will add more later This book is soaked in pain.
I could not help feeling sorry for everyone involved, A lot of insight into Tsarnaevs' background, history, immigrant life in Boston although it was almost like using binoculars, The past in the former Soviet Union was more vivid, more detailed, came out much clearer, As we were approaching most recent events, it was almost like time and circumstances were compressing more and more, until almost no details were visible.
I still don't understand why the brothers did it, As time goes by, we will probably be finding out more, bit by bit, crumb by crumb, It is very difficult to tell this story almost immediately after the events, with a lot of story still "under water", and with a lot of people afraid to answer questions.
This book was disappointing overall, The background on the conflict in Checyna was interesting and informative but the heart of the book should have been the brothers.
One would think, given the title, that this book would have attempted to unpack the motivations of the brothers, or at the very least attempt to understand their relationship.
Instead the second half of the book seems to focus on a halfbaked conspiracy theory that suggests the FBI targets immigrants, Don't waste your timestars
Falters a bit in the lastchapters, The history of Russia over the pastyears and the brothers' family story is absorbing amp fascinating, The description of the students fumbling and throwing out evidence unexpectedly made me laugh, There are many dangling threads that can never be resolved, unless someone in power comes clean,
My overall impression of this one was that it was just too weak, If this had been just about the Tsarnaev brothers themselves or just about Chechen/Russian history or even just about the Boston bombing trials and conspiracy theories, it might have worked better, but the mash up of all three was very uneven.
I'm sure this will be controversial,
The first sign is the disclaimer at the beginning that says, essentially, I realize that a lot of people were hurt in the Boston Marathon bombing, but this isn't about that.
Not that this book should be obligated to be about how bad the marathon bombing was, As if. In fact, I ended up liking this a lot more than I would have if it had been a straightforward account of the attack itself, which I probably also would have enjoyed.
The author covered the wars in Chechnya in thes and had an apparentlynotparticularlypleasant experience as a Russian immigrant in the Boston area as a teenager, and so that's what a lot of this ends up being about, the wars, terrorism, limited opportunity and what have you that they were fleeing in Russia and Central Asia, and the shitty to say the least experience they had here in the US.
The stuff on Russia's various conflicts was fascinating and I imagine would be news to almost anyone here in Murica, including it would seem people who are paid taxpayer dollars out the ass to be experts on that sort of thing.
There's very little on the bombing itself and the kids who supposedly carried it out, and even less that couldn't just be found in the wiki, I'm sure in part because the author couldn't talk Eric Holder into letting Jahar sit for an interview, especially after what happened with Rolling Stone.
The kid's got enough groupies, If and when they fry his ass, it'll rival Zayn Malik leaving One Direction and not just because they have a similar look.
The actual story of the bombing, to the extent that it's told here, only makes up maybe a third of the book.
The rest is pontificating about the ineptitude, if not fullon corruption of law enforcement, and the myriad abuses of the War on Terror, and conspiracy theories about who really planted those bombs.
Apparently, marathonbombing troof is a thing on the Internets now, Of course it is.
I'd say that, at the very least, the author makes a pretty good case that the FBI et al, knew a lot more about the attacks than they were letting on, You can tell she's on to something because otherwise Janet Napolitano wouldn't have bothered issuing a response in the New York Times the other day.
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