The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy by Masha Gessen (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Masha Gessen has written a dry-eyed and detached account of the Tsarnaev brothers’ family history, situating the two boys as best she can in the context of their dysfunctional family, who would have been most comfortable settling down in Dagestan but made the fateful decision to move to the US without thinking it through and without the inner and outer resources to cope in 21st-century America. Gessen is good at charting the ironies of the Tsarnaev family’s situation but doesn’t do a great job at bringing the reader close to them. It’s clear from her Afterword that she wasn’t able to get access to many people for interviews–they were too afraid–and she did a decent job with what she had. But we see this family from the outside from beginning to end.Gessen brings up the disturbing suggestion that the Tsarnaev brothers were pawns in a bigger game. She describes the murky intersection of the FBI, Watertown police, Tamerlan’s past history of drug dealing and connections with the FBI…without drawing any final conclusions except that it’s clear that Tamerlan was on the FBI’s radar and may have at one point been an informant. She thinks that someone else helped the brothers make the bombs, but it is, frustratingly, left up to the reader to connect the dots.I will say that Gessen does an excellent job in painting the grim picture of what Stalin did to the Chechens. She also has a realistic awareness of the pervasive corruption of both Russia and America that’s born out of her personal experience, but which won’t necessarily please American readers. While she doesn’t focus as much on the Tsarnaevs themselves as I would have wanted, she certainly highlights the nasty and draconian way that the Tsarnaevs’ friends and associates, including Dzokhar’s clueless student pals, were treated by law enforcement. I hope that the book can one day be published in a new edition with more info.

⭐This book left me with more questions than answers. I was confused by the relationships and, ultimately about whether these brothers actually bombed the Boston Marathon.

⭐Though this book didn’t get a high rating from other readers, I think it’s because they wanted something that read like a story instead of a historical novel.People also want simple answers and don’t understand the dynamics behind an inability to assimilate, high expectations, and poverty I found the description of Chechnian history interesting as a backdrop to the brothers’ lives, and reading about the daily life of its’ inhabitants re-affirmed that I live in the greatest country on earth. Just the misery of living in these small Russian states should be an eye opener to anyone. The fact that the government itself isn’t exacty sure of what was behind the attacks, (radicalization, etc.) the Russian author gives us enough background to understand the brothers were disingenuous about their roles in American society.Though not being able to fit in (though the inability to assimilate isn’t quite that simple) isn’t an excuse for a terror attack, it may have been extreme enough to turn into an intense hatred. “I want it, I can’t have it, so I hate and destroy it” They also, if they had planned on being martyrs, worked awfully hard to try to stay alive afterward.Very interesting, thought provoking book.

⭐For a book supposively written by a journalist, a lot of the writing is more imposed opinion than it is fact. The writing to fill in the facts with speculations from the author is so bad, it feels like the author was compensating for a lack in material. Here is an example sentence from chapter seven in the book. ” Azamat Tazhayakov, a short boy with a face and broad chested body would surely, with age, become as perfectly round as his father’s, was the son of an oil executive who fancied himself one of the dozen most influential men in Kazakhstan and was probably one of a hundred.” The author could of simply written that this person was the son of an oil executive without the needed garnish about how he will look obese in old age. That is pure speculation from the author’s part and not important. The entire book is written like this. I found it to be very annoying. Research was done to write this book but if you cut out all the speculations and other garnishes, it would be a smaller read.

⭐Probably a hard subject, but you come away from this book not really feeling like you know a lot more about the people involved. Large parts of the book are devoted to the detailing of the physical movements of the brothers and their family members between the US, Dagestan and other places – it makes the point that they were uprooted, but little else. Later on the book does get clearer, and appears to ultimately conclude that the brothers were not acting alone, but were tools in the hands of other forces. Not a hugely satisfying read, I am afraid. I did read it soon after the book about Breivik, the Norwegian criminal called “One of Us” which is an outstanding book and really tells you much about what drove that man to his crimes.

⭐I gave it five stars because I’ve never written a book and it can’t be easy. But honestly I wouldn’t buy this book if I were you. It is very difficult to read, and the first five or six chapters are about relatives of relatives. I was very confused as to how any of this is relevant and had a hard time remembering any of their names. I was hoping for a true crime story that included in depth descriptions of the criminals, the crime, and the investigation but this was not it, this is more of an overview and mostly the author’s opinions.

⭐What a tragic story! Masha Gesson did excellent research in Dagestan, Chechnya, Kirgizstan and the US to piece together the story of the Tsarnaev brothers. The Tsarnaev parents had a strong marriage and four beautiful children — not the kind family one expects to fall apart. They were close to their many relatives. Gessen’s descriptions of life in the Caucasus are fascinating. The boys were intelligent and capable students. They came to America as refugees from the Russian war against Chechnya. To watch this family fall to pieces is heart-breaking.

⭐Excellent. Thoroughly researched. Because she speaks the language, she can follow the complex and sometimes bizarre history of this family.The story is getting tired, though. Atrocious acts carried out by disaffected young men who cannot find a place for themselves in the U.S.Orlando massacre the same. Not so much ideology as loners experiencing personal frustration, unhappiness, and feelings of inferiority.This is what makes acts of terrorism so attractive to these individuals. Power, at last, is theirs. The oldest story in the world, really.Gessen is an excellent writer who sought and found the messy truth in this story.These brothers, who killed and maimed so many at the Boston Marathon, are not terrifying monsters. They are just pathetic.

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