They just dropped out of life and got on the internet. No theological revelations took place no shadowy figures radicalised the brothers. And in this lies the book’s most chilling lesson: the extreme ordinariness of this descent. It is also the beginnings of a classic tale of immigrant wandering that ends ultimately in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the implosion of the American dream into bloody violence.
This is the birthplace of Zubeidat, the mother of the Boston bombers, Tamerlan, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and perhaps the most important influence on their descent into radicalism. (It boasts a “Russian Orthodox church,” writes Gessen, “and, directly across the street, one abortion clinic.”) The book opens in Makhachkala, the capital of the Russian province of Dagestan, a place so miserable it looks to neighbouring Chechnya as a source of sophistication. One of its central themes is dislocation-cultural, ethnic and emotional. This is the question that Masha Gessen seeks to answer in her new and provocative book The Tsarnaev Brothers. What made two young American boys build two pressure cooker bombs that killed and injured hundreds of their fellow citizens at a community marathon? The Tsarnaev Brothers: The Road to a Modern Tragedy by Masha Gessen (Scribe, £14.99)
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