The Tsarnaev Brothers

Book excerpt: An important story for our Era: How the American dream went wrong for two immigrants, and the nightmare that resulted. The facts of the tragedy are established: on 15 April 2013, two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others. The elder of the brothers implicated in the attack, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in the ensuing manhunt; Dzhokhar's trial got underway in early 2015. What we don't know is why. How did such a nightmare come to pass? Bestselling Russian author Masha Gessen delivers a probing and powerful story of dislocation, and the longing for clarity and identity that can reach the point of combustion. She is uniquely endowed with the background, access, and talent to offer unprecedented insight into who the brothers were and how they came to do what they appear to have done. Most significantly, she reconstructs the struggle between assimilation and alienation that fuelled their apparent metamorphosis into a new breed of homegrown terrorist, with their feet planted on American soil but their loyalties elsewhere - a split identity that seems to have incubated a deadly sense of mission.