Customer Reviews

Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya

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As an avid devotee of literature and a graduate with a degree in International Relations, this book is a dream. It is one of those books you stumble across, glance at and pick up thinking that it has an interesting subject, but without expecting much more. And so it was with me; a book found accidentally on Amazon. I had actually read an article in The Economist about it a month back or so, and so I knew it had strong credentials. The the article, however, hadn't inspired any desire to read the book, even though Jagielski had been compared to Kapuscinski, another famous Polish journalist whose works are remarkable and well-worthwhile. I decided to pick this book up on a whim, feeling the need to explore a part of the world I found strange. I spent a summer in southern Russia a year ago, and there I acquired a very negative opinion about Chechens and Chechnya is general. At the time, Chechnya had seemed a very scary and mysterious place, even though I was only a few miles away.

I have been accustomed to thinking that Chechnya is nothing but a terrorist dumping ground, filled to the brink with weaponry and radical ideology. And well, it IS, more or less. But there's much more to it than what you'll find in newspaper headlines. Westeners, like myself, tend to have a foggy and mystical perception of the Chechnya and the Caucasus, and Jagielski captures and plays with this perception. The book manages to reveal that mystical spirit of the Caucasus in a very up close and personal way; it really gives the feeling of being present there, in the center of the war, in a very foreign land. It isn't apologetic. It isn't wrapped up in the political bog surrounding Chechnya. It doesn't ask who is right and who is wrong. It asks, who are these people? What makes them this way? His depictions are shocking, enthralling, and downright poetic. Regardless of politics, one can't help but relate to the problems Aslan Maskhodov finds himself in. Like a presidential Hamlet, he hopelessly tries to do what is right in the midst of a violent maelstrom, where everything seems wrong, and his hopes for peace are thwarted by his own people.

I can only hope that there shall be more translations of Jagielski's works soon.

Great report of war seen from the point of view of those who do not have the power of controlling or corrupting international media to transmit their call for freedom across to the world.