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The Road to an American Tragedy
Riverhead
April 2015
On Sale: April 7, 2015
288 pages
ISBN: 1594632642
EAN: 9781594632648
Kindle: B00QSHI5T2
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction
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.
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