Masha Gessen is woefully underrated and is one of the most important journalists working today. And if Russia's track-record with journalists critical of the Putin regime are any indication, she is an incredibly brave woman who risks her life in order to report. She is uniquely positioned, as a Russian American journalist who built her career on coverage of the war in Chechnya, to write about the Tsarnaev brothers and the historical-cultural context that lead to the events of the Boston Bombing.

I consumed this book very quickly. When the Boston Bombing manhunt was playing out on television, I was at a conference for work, and my colleagues and I spent all our free time in the hotel bar, glued to the television. Once the manhunt (and the conference) were over, it was very easy to transition back to normal life and forget about the narrative we had been given. Reading The Brothers was an important reminder of the incredibly frustrating number of mistakes made by the American media in the immediate aftermath. Gessen's research serves as a much-needed reminder that there are two sides to every story, and while her sympathy for the Tsarnaevs (especially Dzhokhar) occasionally comes on too strong, her willingness to carefully examine and question the events surrounding the bombing is admirable.

I picked up her book hoping to find thoughtful answers to the many unanswered questions that remain -- including the motive for the crime, which has been short-handed as "radicalization" in a way that feels really insufficient. Instead I walked away from this book with more questions than answers, which is a frustrating experience, but it's also, at least in this case, the mark of good journalism.

Pussy Riot was one of those things that arrived in the news, and suddenly everyone was behaving like it was thing that naturally, everybody already knew everything about. But I found that whenever I tried to engage anyone in a conversation about them, no one actually knew anything. It seemed like everyone would rather pretend to know about it than actually know about it, which is why I've enjoyed Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen's really in-depth look at the Pussy Riot women and their performative protests. Her exclusive and unparalleled access to the members and their families makes for a very insightful read. Nor does Gessen allow any personal bias to creep in on the narrative, which is somewhat incredible given how much time she spent in interviews and correspondence with her subjects. It reads more like the great long-form journalism we've come to expect from publications like The Atlantic or BuzzFeed.

For those especially interested in Russian culture, Gessen's previous book, The Man Without a Face: the Unlikely Rise of Putin is really, really excellent and utterly chilling.