Journalist Masha Gessen will write about the Tsarnaev brothers, tracing their family history from Chechnya to the horrific bombings they carried out in Boston. In the video embedded above, watch Gessen speak on The Daily Show.
Riverhead Books will publish the book, coming from the author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A Russian-American journalist, Gessen lives and works in Moscow. Here’s more from the release:
The book will explain who the brothers were, where they came from, what shaped them, 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, it will follow the brothers from strife-ridden Kyrgyzstan to war-torn Dagestan, and then, as new émigrés, to the looking-glass, utterly disorienting peace and order of Cambridge, Mass. Most crucially, it will reconstruct the struggle that ensued for each of the brothers, between assimilation and alienation, and their alleged metamorphosis into a new breed of home-grown terrorist, with their feet on American soil but their loyalties elsewhere, a split in identity that can be the breeding ground for a deadly sense of mission.