It's an interesting if difficult read for someone who was affected by the bombing. Gessen provides some good background on the environment that the Tsarnaevs came out of but cherry picks details from their lives to portray them in a way more sympathetic than I could really take. I think her point is that they were nothing special; if so, why did this happen? There are also moments when she is tone-deaf and her analogies miss the mark. Saying that the Tsarnaev brothers were the Russian equivalent of African-Americans is.... no. I get that they were ethnic minorities who stood out and were recognizable as such but... no. The conspiracy stuff is weird also and doesn't ring true for me. Other reviewers have summarized my feelings about this book well so I won't belabor. But yeah. Weird book, missing bits, too easy on the brothers and their parents. ( )

Tells the story of the Boston Marathon Bombers from the perspective of their ties in Chechnya and surrounding areas. Once they are caught, she switches focus from the brothers to other Chechen Americans, including the friends of Jahar, describing their treatment by the FBI (it wasn't nice or fair; the presumption was that they were all guilty by association if nothing else). She ends by pointing out the several puzzling elements to the case (e.g., the uninvestigated triple murder several years before, the claim by the FBI to not recognize Tamerlan despite its having investigated him only two years previously, and the family on almost an annual basis for a decade) to wondering if Tamerlan was not an FBI informant gone rogue. One has wonder. If, however, you want a fuller description of the legal trial of the surviving brother, you'll need an additional read. But this one should definitely be in the mix. ( )

The background information on Russia and Chechnya and family dynamics was interesting and enlightening. Gessen also investigates what happened to Dzhorkhar's friends and Tamerlan's acquaintances after the bombing, Finally, she reports on the conspiracy theories and agrees that the FBI could have been involved in setting up the brothers who took it a step further than expected. The writing is reporterly and unexceptional. ( )

When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested for the Boston Marathon bombing, my husband and I got into an argument.

"Who cares where he's from?" he said. "Everyone's talking about his family being from Chechnya like that's enough to make him a terrorist in and of itself. He's an immigrant. Okay. How is his being from Chechnya any different from his being from Ireland?"

I don't know if he picked Ireland because it's a country he's heard of, because I'm Irish, or because we're both old enough to remember a time when saying you were from Ireland would lead a listener to thoughts of (and possibly questions about) the IRA. I do know that he's someone who's morally opposed to putting people in ill-fitting boxes, and he'd just come home from a long day with coworkers who had no problem with the idea that Muslim immigrant = terrorist just waitin' to happen.

"I understand what you mean," I said. "And I know everyone's being a big collective idiot about he and his brother being Muslims, and I'm sick of it, too. But there's something wrong with your example. There's something more going on than that. Being from Ireland isn't anything like being from Chechnya."

I had to wait for Masha Gessen to write The Brothers before I could figure out exactly what I meant. I felt vindicated when I got to page 60 and read this:

American society, perhaps more than some others, goes through distinct cycles, separated by shifts in the national psyche. But to a new immigrant, nothing was here before – and there is no inkling that things will be different after. There is only the mood of the present moment, and this mood becomes what America feels like. The Tsarnaevs arrived a few months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington had united Americans in fear.

This was the idea I'd been feeling around for that tired night in the kitchen when I'd been trying to argue with my husband and wash the dishes at the same time and had ended by doing a lousy job at both. Being an immigrant is tough no matter where you're from or how much you wanted to live in your new country. Being an immigrant from a country most Americans have only heard of in relation to the War on Terror – well, that makes you the redheaded stepchild of the immigrant family, to say the least.

That's the story Gessen tells. Bear in mind that she started work on this book practically the day Dzhokhar was arrested. I started reading it the week his death sentence was announced.

This book is not about his trial, or about how he and his brother went about bombing the marathon. It's about who was arrested for that bombing and why.

It's also the story of the banality of evil. To me, the most shocking part of this book is – well, how boring the brothers were before it happened. They weren't particularly intelligent or devout. Neither of them seem as if they were interested in or engaged with the world or even their own lives. If they had a reason for waking up in the morning, I couldn't tell you what it was. They just don't come across as the kind of people who could care enough about anything to do something violent.

They reminded me of a character from a novel I love, Lolly Willowes:

Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to speculate towards irreligion.

I'm not naïve enough to think that anyone who commits a violent crime must be some wild-eyed fanatic and/or evil genius. Frankly, as a smallish middle-aged woman living in an increasingly weird city, I'm starting to wonder if all men are just one bad day and one cheap gun away from going on a killing spree. But I did expect to get some sense of why the brothers did what they did.

Maybe one of the points of this book is that there isn't any such sense to be had. Excuse me for quoting at length, but I think this is important:

Very soon, many of Tamerlan's and Jahar's friends would be telling the FBI and the media that it was impossible that the brothers were the bombers – there had been no sign. Surely, the friends would say, if the two had been plotting something so huge and horrible, they would have seemed distracted. Or emotional. Or pensive. Or somehow, clearly, not themselves. But this assumption was a misconception. The psychiatrist and political scientist Jerrold Post, who has been studying terrorists for decades, writes, "Terrorists are not depressed, severely emotionally disturbed, or crazed fanatics." Political scientist Louise Richardson, an undisputed star in the tiny academic field of terrorism studies, writes of terrorists: "Their primary shared characteristic is their normalcy, insofar as we understand the term. Psychological studies of terrorism are virtually unanimous on this point."

Nor do terrorists tend to behave out of character just before committing an act that, to them, appears perfectly rational and fully justified. One of the September 11 hijackers called his wife in Germany on the morning of the attacks to tell her he loved her; she apparently heard nothing extraordinary in his voice. Having made the decision to commit an act of terrorism, the future bomber – even a suicide bomber – develops, it would appear, a sort of two-track mind. On one track, life goes on exactly as before; on the other, he is preparing for the event that will disrupt his life or even end it. It is precisely the ordinary nature of the man and the extraordinary effect of the act about to be committed that ensure the two tracks never cross.

This passage kept coming to mind as I listened to a news report about the mother of the gunman in the recent shooting at a Tunisian beach. The woman was horrified by what her son had done, and was frantically trying to make sense of it. What had she missed? Her son – an electrical engineering student who had a girlfriend and liked soccer and break-dancing – was outstandingly ordinary.

I might have had trouble believing that before I read this book. I have no trouble believing it now.

Sadly, I think The Brothers should be required reading. The history it covers is interesting; the ideas it offers are vital. ( )