The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy
Written by Masha Gessen
Narrated by Hillary Huber
4/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
National Book Award winner Masha Gessen tells an important story for our era: How the American Dream went wrong for two immigrants, and the nightmare that resulted.
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.
Masha Gessen
MASHA GESSEN is a journalist who has written for Slate, Seed, the New Republic, the New York Times, and other publications, and is the author of numerous books, including The Future is History, which has been nominated for the National Book Award.
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Reviews for The Brothers
6 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I am struck by what grifters the Tsarnaev's seemed to be. I can't see where any of them added anything to the quality of life around them.They got public assistance and were small time drug dealers.The boy's mother was arrested for shoplifting but the author didn't mention this. Then there are the many trips back to Chechnya and Dagestan. I'm wondering how those were financed? I expected to see something about the elder brother's wife but there was just a cursory look at her. At one point the author talked about mass murders and white anger, then cited the Virginia Tech shooting, where the perp was Korean. Perhaps he was a white Asian like George Zimmerman was a white Hispanic. A disappointing book for me.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's an interesting if difficult read for someone who was affected by the bombing. Gessen provides some good background on the environment that the Tsarnaevs came out of but cherry picks details from their lives to portray them in a way more sympathetic than I could really take. I think her point is that they were nothing special; if so, why did this happen? There are also moments when she is tone-deaf and her analogies miss the mark. Saying that the Tsarnaev brothers were the Russian equivalent of African-Americans is.... no. I get that they were ethnic minorities who stood out and were recognizable as such but... no. The conspiracy stuff is weird also and doesn't ring true for me. Other reviewers have summarized my feelings about this book well so I won't belabor. But yeah. Weird book, missing bits, too easy on the brothers and their parents.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tells the story of the Boston Marathon Bombers from the perspective of their ties in Chechnya and surrounding areas. Once they are caught, she switches focus from the brothers to other Chechen Americans, including the friends of Jahar, describing their treatment by the FBI (it wasn't nice or fair; the presumption was that they were all guilty by association if nothing else). She ends by pointing out the several puzzling elements to the case (e.g., the uninvestigated triple murder several years before, the claim by the FBI to not recognize Tamerlan despite its having investigated him only two years previously, and the family on almost an annual basis for a decade) to wondering if Tamerlan was not an FBI informant gone rogue. One has wonder. If, however, you want a fuller description of the legal trial of the surviving brother, you'll need an additional read. But this one should definitely be in the mix.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well-written and researched by prominent anti-government author Masha Gessen, formerly of Russia. She has previously written books about the plight of the Soviet people. She is fabulous writer and I found this book extremely riveting. I don't think anyone could not be sympathetic to the plight of immigrants from the "stans" and other countries who come to the US seeking freedom and peace. The Tsarnaev family was no different; however, Gessen does not hold the family to account for their lives. At the end, she also makes allowances for the friends of the brothers to withhold knowledge of their identities to the police as well as their destruction of evidence. Law enforcement did not get fair reporting.