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The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War | 
 enlarge | Author: Asne Seierstad
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 66687
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.3
ISBN: 0465011225
Dewey Decimal Number: 947.52086
EAN: 9780465011223
ASIN: 0465011225
Publication Date: September 8, 2008
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Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
In the early hours of New Year’s 1994, Russian troops invaded the Republic of Chechnya, plunging the country into a prolonged and bloody conflict that continues to this day. A foreign correspondent in Moscow at the time, Asne Seierstad traveled regularly to Chechnya to report on the war, describing its affects on those trying to live their daily lives amidst violence. In the following decade, Seierstad became an internationally renowned reporter and author, traveling to the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other war-torn regions. But she never lost sight of this conflict that had initially inspired her career. Over the course of a decade, she watched as Russia ruthlessly suppressed an Islamic rebellion in two bloody wars and as Chechnya evolved into one of the flashpoints in a world now focused on the threat of international terrorism. In 2006, Seierstad finally returned to Chechnya, traveling in secret and under the constant threat of danger. In a broken and devastated society she lived with orphans, the wounded, the lost. And she lived with the children of Grozny, those who will shape the country’s future. She asks the question: What happens to a child who grows up surrounded by war and accustomed to violence? A compelling, intimate, and often heartbreaking portrait of Chechnya today, The Angel of Grozny is a vivid account of a land’s violent history and its ongoing battle for freedom.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A salutary reminder of an overlooked & bloody conflict December 7, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Asnes Seierstad wonders, early in this book, "how do you go to a war?" She's based in Moscow, covering what seem to her increasingly mundane stories of Russian life, and struggling to understand the nature of the war that has broken out in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. The story begins when she talks her way on to a military transport to Grozny and lands in the middle of what is now known as the first Chechen war, in the mid 1990s.
But the book revolves around the aftermath of the second Chechen War, a decade later, when Seierstad combines the narratives of illicit trips (disguised and traveling under a false Chechen identity) and official 'group tours' organized for foreign journalists. It's the contrast between the two experiences that make up the principal drama of this book. On the one hand, she recounts the harrowing experiences of a mother who loses three of her four sons in various ways -- and whose fourth son returns after horrible torture. Set against the suffering, the absurdity of the current Chechen regime -- widely seen as a puppet government -- stands in even more striking contrast. In a park, police intervene when she is speaking to a local man. "We just have to make sure that people don't say the wrong things to you," the police chief tells her, earnestly. "Things that aren't true. We have to make sure that people tell the truth."
The truth that emerges from these pages is that a conflict of this ferocity leaves few heroes or heroines in its wake. One candidate is the title character, Hadijat, who earns her nickname for taking in scores of orphaned, abused and abandoned children. The children themselves are tragic figures, struggling to build lives of some kind after being traumatized. Seierstad doesn't shy away from displaying the full complexity of the situation; Liana, one abused young girl, is a thief, lazy and a fantasist who steals the money set aside to buy bread for the whole children's home. There is no one who can fail to feel compassion for Liana's plight; equally, I can't imagine who would be willing to open their home to her.
Seierstad is best known for The Bookseller of Kabul, a sharply-focused book about the aftermath of what then seemed to be the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This book, while less narrowly focused and a bit more rambling, is perhaps ultimately a more valuable one. While US and NATO troops are present in Afghanistan, a degree of public attention will continue to be directed there, and outrage rightly continues to grow about the horrific situation in Darfur. In Chechnya, however, it seems likely that people will continue to disappear and die unnoticed by the rest of the world. We deserve to be reminded of our apathy.
According to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, in the years since 1992, a total of 49 journalists have been killed in Russia for doing their job -- reporting the news. No fewer than 18 of them died in Chechnya, while anothoer 7 have disappeared without trace there. One well-known journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in Moscow; her furious denunciations of atrocities in Chechnya are believed to have been among the factors leading to her murder. We should be grateful that Seierstad, a Norwegian journalist with no axe to grind, nevertheless chose to risk her own life in order to provide the rest of the world with a first-hand view of life in Chechnya today.
 Admirable Research, Disappointing Conclusion November 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The title speaks of a woman who runs an independent orphanage in Chechnya's capital, a real "angel" who has dedicated her life to the conflict's youngest victims and, indirectly, to a safer and more sustainable future for the republic. However, Asne Seierstad's account of the Chechen war stretches far beyond its children - as it should, given the limited knowledge of most Western readers on the subject.
In her detailed narrative - which manages to be a surprisingly quick read, - Seierstad outlines the war's historic context, dedicates a chapter to the oft-forgotten deportation of Chechens into Kazakhstan, spends time on the plight of Russia's military, and interviews people in positions both high and low. She is an admirable reporter who, in keeping with the best of her profession, seems devoid of fear for her own safety. In addition, her eye for the human side of things makes the book a far more compelling story than most articles published about Chechnya these days.
That said, Seierstad is no superwoman: In the end, she falls victim to the same vices observed among most Western journalists covering emergency situations all throughout the non-Western world. Entire chapters are dedicated to a subtle ridicule of post-war Chechnya. People raised in the comfort and righteousness of the world's more "successful" countries (of the United States or Norway variety) seem to find themselves repeatedly incapable to understand that post-conflict societies cannot flip a switch and become law-abiding playgrounds of free thought.
Perhaps the details of Grozny's cumbersome bureaucracy and numerous (but laughably mission-less) administrative institutions are an attempt by Seierstad to return to the impersonal, fact-based journalistic style missing from the book's first section. Or, they may be another stroke of paint meant to highlight the ridicule of politics in the face of Chechnya's human tragedy. In either case, Seierstad shows surprisingly little sympathy for the average resident of Grozny when she describes their avid enthusiasm for Ramzan Kadyrov, the republic's new (puppet) president. To someone who has lived through political upheaval, it becomes painfully obvious that she is missing the link between a population's suffering and its elemental need for heroes - be they corrupt or true - in the disaster's aftermath.
A Chekhovian gift for literary journalism October 17, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Either Asne Seierstad is seriously brave or seriously insane. In 2006, despite a ban on foreigners traveling without government sanction and escort to Chechnya, she disguised herself as a Chechen (which, for a Norwegian, involves dark hair dye and long, well-pinned scarves) and, with the help of friends, smuggled herself into the war-torn republic - one of the most dangerous war zones on Earth.
Seierstad is no stranger to war zones. Her bestseller, The Bookseller of Kabul, recounts life in Afghanistan through intimate portraits of a middle class family, gained through her living incognito in that milieu. And her more recent A Hundred and One Days looked at life in Baghdad on the eve of the American invasion.
In this instance, Seierstad is on a quest to meet the Angel for whom this book is named - a Chechen woman who grew up an orphan in the Soviet system, a self-appointed caretaker for the orphaned children of Grozny (the second war, by UNICEF's account, created 25,000 orphans). But, more fundamentally, she feels called to Chechnya, which she visited frequently in the 1990s, during the first Russo- Chechen war:
The trips to Chechnya changed me. When I went back to Moscow to recuperate, I became depressed, had lost my drive. I just wanted to go back again. Real life was in the mountains, where people were waging a life-and-death struggle. Little by little I became almost anti-Russian, from being captivated by the poetry, the music, in search of `the Russian soul', I became aware of the racism, the nationalism, the corruption of senior government officials, the ignorance, the bleak history; as Anton Chekhov put it: `Russian life is like a thousand-pound stone, it grinds a Russian down till there's not even a wet patch left.'
And so she dons her disguise, readying to fly to Vladikavkaz.
The dark brown scarf is knotted firmly at my neck.
`Now you look like one of us!'
Two women from the North Caucasus, one a native, the other disguised as one, are going to board an aeroplane. Scarves on their heads, full skirts, clicking heels.
`But most important of all: don't smile all the time, and stop looking around as you usually do. Your open expression gives you away immediately. Keep your head down, frown and look unfriendly.'
There's no turning back now. A few pages on, after they have landed in Vladikavkaz and passed uneventfully from Russia into Ingushetia, their driver replies to her request to slow down with a fact Seierstad admits to having known, namely: "Anyone who's afraid shouldn't go to Chechnya."
And so people like Seierstad go for us, suppressing fear with bravery or insanity (or a mixture of the two). The result, in Seierstad's case, is a moving and insightful portrait of a forgotten war in a forgotten corner of the Russian empire, of the people whose lives intersect with the Angel (Hadijat) and with the author's. Seierstad spent several months in this "post-war" Chechnya, living in Hadijat's orphanage and learning the children's heartbreaking stories. She also returned there officially, as a guest of the Kadyrov regime, which she portrays in all its bombast and ignominy.
Seierstad tells human stories that we all need to hear, shorn of politics. She travels with a perceptive eye and has a Chekhovian gift for literary journalism, for telling stories with meaning, for capturing the ink lines of character and bringing them to the printed page. This promises to be one of this fall's best books.
(Reviewed in Russian Life)
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