Referal of The New York Review Of Books
(http://www.nybooks.com/index)

Volume 51, Number 4 · March 11, 2004

Review
Mysteries of the Caucasus
By Christian Caryl
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE

Stories I Stole
by Wendell Steavenson
Grove, 277 pp., $24.00

The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire
by Khassan Baiev, with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff
Walker, 376 pp., $26.00

Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars
by Nicholas Griffin
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 240 pp., $24.95

Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War
by Thomas de Waal
New York University Press, 336 pp., $35.00

Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory
by Yo'av Karny
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 436 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Fifteen years ago no one paid much attention to the Caucasus, and certainly not as a region in its own right. The sparse news that came out of the place was dictated by the epic of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and stories about the republics sandwiched between the Black Sea and the Caspian often had Moscow datelines. Those days are over. The Caucasus has all the features of early-twenty-first-century politics-- ethnic wars and convoluted tribalism; the threat of Islamist terrorism; the dream of liberal democracy and the challenges of globalization; the struggle for control of world energy resources--and has taken a major part in the neo-imperial calculations of the United States after September 11. ...

3708 words
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