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Virtual True Crime Book Group

The Brothers by Masha Gessen

True crime book group meeting to discuss "The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy" by Masha Gessen.

Love watching true crime documentaries and tv shows? Can't get enough of true crime podcasts?

This is a monthly book group focused on reading and discussing True Crime.

Join us on Zoom to discuss The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy by Masha Gessen.

This title is available electronically from Libby/Overdrive for free with your library card. Libby copies will be available 4 weeks before the group's meeting date.

catalog record for physical book

"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 brought to trial. Yet even after the guilty verdict and the death sentence, what we didn't know was 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 able to tell us. A teenage immigrant herself, she returned to Russia to cover firsthand the transformations that wracked the region from the 1990s on. It is there that she begins her astonishing account of the Tsarnaev brothers, descendants of ethnic Chechens deported to Central Asia in the Stalin era. Following 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 an utterly disorienting new world, she reconstructs the brothers' struggle between assimilation and alienation, which incubated 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." -From the publisher

Questions? Email Katy at kjacob@cityofevanston.org.

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