So this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a chopper.

If art has something to say to us about the planet we are destroying it can rarely have been better expressed than by Before I Sleep, a show created for last month’s Brighton Festival. It takes a moment and a character from Chekhov and transforms them into an experience that shakes up our notions of everything from high art to the everyday banality of shopping to the ecoapocalypse.  And with brilliant appropriation of place, it is staged in the shell of a run-down former Co-op department store on one of Brighton’s grimmest roads.

Remember Firs, the old butler left behind at the end of The Cherry Orchard? He is abandoned because of the economic development of the land and the sweeping away of the old order, represented in the threat to cut down the orchard. The presiding spirit of the piece, he greets us and reappears in various scenes as we move through the darkened, neglected building. The journey takes us from snowy Russian wastes in miniature to a full-size department store where every assistant speaks a different language and on to a drowned future.

Oh, yes, the imperative behind the destruction of the orchard leads inexorably to the Millennium Retail store, your international focus of the capitalist dream. And if we have eyes to see through the multi-media settings and ears to hear what’s being said behind the multi-lingual blandishments, we might understand the transformation from forest to flood that threatens the planet.

But to begin at the beginning.

It is three-dimensional magic, boxes within boxes, houses within houses, levels within levels, while we the spectators become actors in a promenade performance whose strangeness confuses, alarms, exhilarates, entertains and, hopefully, enlightens.

 We enter in groups of four on the ground floor. A guide knocks on a door and an old man with a candle peers round, muttering in Russian, and leads us in. It is pitch dark apart from his little flame. We stumble after him, bemused, as he seems to get shorter and feebler before the candle gutters and goes out. Assuming he has descended some steps we brace ourselves for a fall. Space and time begin to fracture. But another light glows and it’s clear that he has crawled into a low bed where he lies under blankets, muttering. Suddenly, there is light everywhere. We are in a glass-walled room where three Russian women in modern dress are shouting at us, and gesturing angrily through the glass. They lead us out and direct us through a door into a huge room, whose entire floor is covered by a miniature winter scene from the play. There is the house, with the orchard behind it….

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In 1997, Camilla Carr and Jonathan James were kidnapped and held for fourteen months in Chechnya. Speaking neither Russian nor Chechen, armed with good intentions and a car full of toys, the two Britons had volunteered to help traumatised children in Grozny. They were soon kidnapped, and this book – The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya – is a ghastly tale of casual violence and the kidnappers’ contempt for their hostages.

Many who travelled to Chechnya at this time got into trouble. A tough and resourceful Russian woman journalist I knew also worked with children in Grozny. Galya thought she knew what she was doing, but the Chechen man she most trusted betrayed her and she was taken captive. After her release, she fostered half a dozen Chechen children in her tiny flat in Moscow. She did not return to Chechnya.

Around the same time the authors and Galya were seized, I was held under armed guard while attempting to track down President Dzhokhar Dudayev in hiding. Luckily, one bearded fighter recognised me from an afternoon when we had sheltered from shellfire together. The atmosphere lightened, and we were sent on our way to Dudayev. Afterwards, I too stopped working in Chechnya.

So how did the woefully unprepared Jon and Camilla think they would get away with it? Unable to talk to their captors, the couple were reduced to making sense of their situation in their own terms. They deployed healing visualisations, yogic breathing exercises and a strategy of appeasement. They even gave the gunmen massages. One captor raped Camilla many times over a prolonged period, with Jon listening in the next room. Eventually, she made it clear that the experience was terrible. The rapist claimed to be surprised, as he ostensibly thought that western women enjoyed rape. Camilla wondered whether she should have registered her objection sooner. The couple did not ask to be kidnapped, abused and raped, but the lesson is that people should think about the risk of going into an environment already known for the likelihood of kidnapping.

This is a car crash of a book, a how-not-to essay in on working in a war zone. Much of the time, one wants to shake the authors and ask them what they thought they were doing. Jon’s dreadlocks, their massages and Camilla’s clumsy confusion of eating and toilet utensils which so appalled their captors leave the impression that the authors didn’t do their homework. Apparently, they were arrogant enough to think they didn’t have to.

Reviewer: Richard Pendry is a lecturer in broadcast journalism at the University of Kent. He reported from all over the former Soviet Union, including Chechnya, for Frontline News in the 1990s. The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya by Camilla Carr and Jonathan James is published by Canterbury Press and costs £14.99

I have read many sagas of Russian families, but Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews has facets that make it poignant. It is both tragedy and love story by a distinguished chronicler of the East. Matthews has covered Moscow for Newsweek since 1997 and has witnessed the Chechen, Bosnian and latest Iraqi wars. He knows something about the drama and tragedy of turbulent times. He also had his own story, his own Russian life. Half-Russian himself, he listened to his family and searched the archives to uncover what happened to his forebears. Stalin’s Children is not one story, but several.  
 
At its heart is the rise and fall of a single Bolshevik, Boris Bibikov, Matthews’ grandfather. He rose in the Bolshevik Party under Stalin, one of the heroic and tough generation who achieved collectivisation and industrialization at a terrible cost. Bibikov was a senior industrialist manager. Stalin’s old friend and industry chief, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, arrived at Bibikov’s factory to inspect it and urge ever greater efforts. Bibikov lived a high energy existence “spending nights at the office for days on end, but also balancing mistresses with his wife.”

Then in 1937, the atmosphere started to change: Bibikov’s boss, Sergo, opposed the rising arrests in his industrial commissariat and confronted Stalin at a Central Committee plenum. The conflict ended with Sergo’s suicide and the start of mass arrests of top officials. Bibikov was the classic and typical victim of the Great Terror, a senior official and loyal Bolshevik, who had experienced the revolution and known leaders other than Stalin. Soon he was arrested and disappeared. The family were told he had been sentenced for a long term but was alive. His daughters, Ludmilla and Lenina, although there was no Stalina, were truly Stalin’s children. They were taken into orphanages, and their story is at the heart of the book.

This is also the story of how Ludmilla fell in love with Matthews’ intellectual father, Mervyn, who found himself drawn into a KGB trap to “turn” him into a spy. He barely escaped. Here also is the story of how Ludmilla and Mervyn struggled to be together.

The last facet of this three generational story is Matthews’ own life as a journalist in the decadent and wild Moscow of the Nineties and how he uncovered his grandfather’s terrible fate. He writes engagingly about the wild frontier town excesses of Moscow Babylon, such as the notorious Hungry Duck night club. Simultaneously, he tells how he found the truth about Bibikov. The family had believed that he had somehow survived for a long time after 1937. They sent him letters and packages for years. Matthews finds his execution warrant, which showed he had been shot soon after his arrest.

Reviewed by Simon Sebag Montefiore is author of a two-part biography of Stalin and a new novel about three generations of a Russian family, Sashenka. Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews is published by Bloomsbury and costs £17.99.

Somali born journalist Rageh Omaar and director Paul Sapin made Lost Boys, a 27- minute documentary, in four days. The film explores Somali youth inter-gang violence in London. The murder of 18-year-old Mahir Osman in January 2008 by a Somali gang made Clan Elders realize they had lost touch with the younger generation and violence was spiralling out of their control. It was time for the community as a whole to ask itself why second generation Somali men were underachieving and spilling their blood on London streets.

Led by Somali community worker Ahmed Elmi, the film takes us through a series of interviews with gang members and with elders who have taken up patrolling the streets at night. The interviewers also speak with both families of the bereaved and of the murderers. The questions that arise are those typically posed to second-generation immigrants- lost in the space between the "homeland" to which their parents are still attached and the "new land" in which their future is inscribed. Neither here nor there, they struggle to find meaning and identity.

Britain’s Somali community is diverse: the elders who chew Khat (the Somali leaf, legal in Britain, that provides stimulation among its users) and discuss Somalia; successful Somali drug dealers; and young Somalis without jobs or role models who succumb to a pattern of violence and reprisals in which they can finally prove their worth.

This documentary sets itself to break the silence that has shrouded theses issues. It launches a debate within the community pointing at its own responsibility and offers a glimmer of hope by reuniting the families of the criminals with those of their victims. "Where blood has been shed, let something grow". It nevertheless remains a snapshot rather than an in-depth study and its point of view is limited to that of the men. As such, it leaves the audience beckoning more explanations and a deeper understanding of the causes at stake.

After the film, screened at the Frontline Club, the debate continued with the observation of a Somali viewer who noted the huge discrepancy between Somali immigrants in the UK and those in the USA, the latter a thriving community. According to him, one of the major problems was the aid bestowed by the British government on the Somali émigrés. The American notion of "sink or thrive" has, in his view, forced the communities there to succeed, whereas the welfare system in the United Kingdom has condoned a lack of action. 

So how can Somali inter-gang violence subside? By giving a voice to the unrepresented Somali youth, the documentary sparks questions and closes with a plea to end the "myth of return" and tackle the reality of Somalis living in London. The film implies that British Somalis must work together to create a stronger sense of community, integration and dialogue.

Reviewed by Charlotte Goldsmith is a documentary film maker based in London.

Abdel Bari Atwan, author of A Country of Words: a Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page is the famous son of one of these dirt-poor Isdud families, born two years after the nakba, or catastrophe, that overtook his people when Israel was created. When he revisited his family’s original home a few years ago, his North African Jewish driver had no idea there had ever been a place called Isdud. When Bari (as he insists his non-Arab friends call him), treading through the stinking ruins of a former Palestinian site, Café Gaben,  bumped into a Jewish settler, the man said to him, pointing at the ancient detritus: “…that is the past.” “No,” Bari said, “it is also the future.”

It is this kind of fierce determination and will to survive that characterises Gaza and the Gazans. It is also why I described Gazan hopelessness, in my first paragraph, as “apparent”. Anyone who has been to what is now a virtual concentration camp will know that Gazans do not buckle under. The Abdel Bari Atwan story is an epic version of the Gazan refugees’ refusal to accept the overwhelming, demeaning, life-threatening odds that Israel and the West have imposed upon them, the Arab states also doing their bit in this saga of criminal international politics.

Bari fought and harried his way – with his family’s typically Palestinian, almost sacrificial help – from the penury and oppression of Deir al Balah and later Rafah camps through a series of joe-jobs and secondary education in Jordan then Egypt, university in Cairo and progression up the rickety journalistic ladder in Libya, Saudi Arabia and London’s vibrant Arabic media to become editor, in 1989, of Al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem). This is his own newspaper, his own radical mouthpiece and unique, outspoken reflection of the inequities, crimes and joys of the Middle East. He is probably, following the deaths of Yasser Arafat, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, the best-known living Palestinian. His newspaper is so popular that it is banned in as many Arab countries as he himself is – Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Jordan among them.

Al-Quds al-Arabi is no one’s mouthpiece. Bari lists his many differences with Yasser Arafat and most other Arab politicians, and his inside knowledge of Islamic leaders whom our media and politicians demonise is a useful reality check. One of his Islamist interlocutors spells out how Tony Blair made the British an international target for terrorists (cf, the recent Mumbai outrage).

For all his valid criticisms of the British, for what they did to his Palestine, and of the Americans and the Israelis, Abdel Bari makes clear that for the honest Arab journalist his own governments, secret services and often inane fellow citizens pose his greatest threats. He also gives salutary space to the BBC’s record of pusillanimity in the face of Blairite and Israeli pressures on the Palestinian issue.

If this is a cheering, proud and opinionated tale of human determination, humour and iconoclasm, it also portrays the unique sadness of the Palestinians. While most emigrants cherish the knowledge of an original home available for revisit or return, the Palestinian Arab has no such grounding. “I feel,” writes Bari, “that my cultural identity has become blurred with time and that to some extent I have lost my roots…I wonder if history has condemned us [Palestinians] to a permanent state of psychological exile.” A Jew would know exactly what he means—or would have, once.

As our own British Government joins and intensifies the persecution and isolation of the Gazan people, partly because in democratic elections nearly three years ago they voted for a party Britain does not–or is told not to—approve, Abdel Bari’s book is the perfect  guidebook to what has happened, why, and how it goes on and on and on.

Reviewed by Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East Correspondent. A Country of Words: a Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page by Abdel Bari Atwan is published by Saqi Books £20

Cowell has dome something better. His meticulously researched opus – The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder – The First Act of Nuclear Terrorism and the New Cold War – fully justifies its sub-title, which is perhaps the more important part of the story. “Who?” is partly answered in the evidence piled up against Litvinenko’s erstwhile colleague Andrei Lugovoi, whom the British authorities have tried, unsuccessfully, to have extradited from Moscow .
 
Cowell’s summing up of the forensic investigation which proved Litvinenko was poisoned with a minute trace of the isotope Polonium-210, sprayed into a teapot is worthy of “CSI”. It also makes clear how close the authorities came to NOT finding the  murder weapon. Polonium only showed up when a secret facility tested Litvinenko’s final urine sample.

“If the (British)  Ministry of Defence scientists had not run the extremely unusual tests when they did”, Cowell writes. “it is conceivable that the nature of the poisoning would have remained a mystery, as Litvinenko’s killers surely intended it to be…” His description of the poison at work is chilling: “…the isotope tore relentlessly through his bone marrow and his organs, destroying the immune system. The lethal dose measured a tiny fraction of a microgram…This was no ordinary murder.” Rhe “no ordinary” aspect takes thia book to another level, an artful  melding of  “who?” with “why?”

The inescapable conclusion is that the other half of  “who” is the then president, now prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Cowell connects him to the “Why?” with a deft weaving of the role of the Russian oligarchs, especially Litvinenko’s one-time employer and Putin’s enemy Boris Berezovsky and their power struggles with the Kremlin and the Russian security service, the FSB.

Meticulous reporting, using intelligence sources and participants in the affair, shines a light into the usually opaque world of Russian policy. To restore Russia ‘s place as a world power Putin could not tolerate dissent from regional governments, troublesome members the Duma (parliament), journalists (twenty mysteriously killed, including Anna  Politkovskaya) or dissidents like Litvinenko railing from ostensibly safe exile. “Putin,” Cowell writes, “restored what the Russians call the ‘vertical’ power structure, whose apex is the Kremlin.”

The Terminal Spy sums up: “The death of Litvinenko would come to be seen as the defining moment of the Putin presidency. Putin sought to restore Moscow ‘s greatness. The death of Litvinenko ensured that Russia ‘s reputation as a land to be feared for the worst of reasons was revived for all the world to see.” Given that the book was written well before the latest clashes in Georgia, the observation is prescient to say the least.

Reviewed by Allen Pizzey, roving correspondent for CBS News, based in Rome. The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder – The First Act of Nuclear Terrorism and the New Cold War by Alan Cowell published by Doubleday, £16.99.

September 10, 2001,
was a day like any other, Terzani tells us, a day easily forgotten.
But most of us unerringly remember where we were and what we were
doing the following day, before rushing to the closest television set
to see the blazing Twin Towers collapse – those images that
were to be played over and over for weeks to come.

Having spent most of
his life travelling and living in the mystical and superstitious
Asian continent to better understand its inhabitants’ culture
and way of life, Terzani left his Himalayan retreat for Afghanistan
and Pakistan to gain a first-hand perspective of what happened after
September 11^th. The result was this puzzling version of
the war.

The attack on the
Twin Towers and the Pentagon represented an opportunity for Western
societies to evaluate their political behaviour towards and
intolerance of peoples who did not conform to traditional Western
beliefs. His argument was that this created a time for serious
reflection rather than for vengeance. It explored the West’s
aversion to accepting dissimilar – and hence “inferior”
– societies. Thus, as Terzani states, “Religion becomes
an ideological weapon against modernity, the latter seen as
pertaining to the West.” He believes we should be grateful for,
rather than afraid of, being different from one another.

Following the brutal
acts that took place on that September day, the western world –
as represented by the United States and its British manservant –
responded by projecting military power in a war that has not ended
seven years later. Instead of using rationality, the West once
against struck with guns.

Terzani’s book
calls to each of us to take a moment to question the violent world we
inhabit. It is a world of intolerance and injustice, but one we can
change. The author urges us to reflect on the deeper spiritual
meaning of our lives, reminding us that tolerance, not violence, is
the solution for living in a better world.

Tiziano Terzani died
on the July 28, 2004, in Valle d’Orsigna, Italy.

Reviewer Kiki Deere
is a freelance travel writer who has written for the Rough Guides,
Time Out and Fodor’s.

A book on slavery and its brutalities could be a depressing read, but this is not. Rather than cause depression, the material is so shocking that it is more likely to provoke anger. Don Jordan and Michael Walsh use diaries, letters and court and government documents to create a work that deals sensitively with suffering while avoiding sentimentality and sensationalism. Ample references and notes also prove useful, allowing one to follow up any of the copious sources used. For all of the evil that the subject matter portrays, the book reads extremely well and leaves one feeling that visceral disgust for such a trade.

This fast-moving narrative history reads like a documentary, perhaps to be expected from two documentary film makers who worked at World in Action. They bring their storytelling skills with them, creating clear, lasting images of time and place. Both victims and perpetrators come alive in a series of wonderfully observed pen portraits.

The hardback edition of this book was published to coincide with the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007. At the time of publication, some reviewers stupidly suggested that it was somehow possible to diminish the suffering of black slaves by highlighting the pain of white slaves and indentured servants who preceded them. Slavery is hell for the slave, whatever his colour.

There should be hesitation in agreeing to review fairly and honestly a work by colleagues or fellow Frontline Club members. With integrity intact, this reviewer wonders if billing this as a “forgotten history” is strictly accurate. Perhaps that was the publisher’s decision. It is, however, probably true to say that for a great many readers this will be the first time they have been exposed to this particularly dark phase of British history.

Reviewer: Eamonn Gearon is a freelance journalist and writer, who works largely in the Middle East and North and Central Africa.

This is also the story of how Ludmilla fell in love with Matthews’ intellectual father, Mervyn, who found himself drawn into a KGB trap to “turn” him into a spy. He barely escaped. Here also is the story of how Ludmilla and Mervyn struggled to be together.

The last facet of this three generational story is Matthews’ own life as a journalist in the decadent and wild Moscow of the Nineties and how he uncovered his grandfather’s terrible fate. He writes engagingly about the wild frontier town excesses of Moscow Babylon, such as the notorious Hungry Duck night club. Simultaneously, he tells how he found the truth about Bibikov. The family had believed that he had somehow survived for a long time after 1937. They sent him letters and packages for years. Matthews finds his execution warrant, which shoed he had been shot soon after his arrest.

Reviewer: Simon Sebag Montefiore is author of a two-part biography of Stalin and a new novel about three generations of a Russian family, Sashenka.

In its fast-selling Turkish original, the book is part of a genre in modern Turkish literature that tries to fill the gaping hole left by the Armenians in the country’s public history. The theme dominates Orhan Pamuk’s recent Snow and Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul. Çetin’s book is already required reading for students in progressive Turkish institutions like Sabanci University in Istanbul. Along with occasional recent exhibitions and conferences about the lost Armenians, these are Turkey’s first attempts at overcoming a legacy of fearful denial.

Eight other Armenian girls ended up in the small Turkish town where Çetin’s grandmother was taken by the corporal. Even her brother Horen survived to become known as a shepherd called Ahmet. Initially working as domestic servants, then as free wives and mothers, they kept alive customs like eating coloured candy-bread, which they shared at Easter without letting the children know why. Everyone in town knew they were Armenian, and they endured enough discrimination already. Although Muslims, their official papers listed them as “converts,” mocked in the streets as “converts’ sperm” or “leftovers of the sword.” Çetin’s family is convinced this was why one talented relative was unable to take a place in military school.

Translator Maureen Freely, in a valuable introduction, reckons there could be two million such descendants of Armenians among Turkey’s population of 75 million people today. More than 30 other ethnicities still survive, and this new proof of the impossibility of repressing an inherent multi-ethnicity helps explain the shrillness and sometimes schizophrenia of Turkey’s one-nation ideologues. As Çetin makes clear, all in Anatolia are of “impure blood.”

The pain of the Turkish Armenians is not over. As a lawyer, Çetin represents the family of  Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, who was murdered in January 2007 by a young man inspired by the same deep-rooted nationalism. As Çetin’s grandmother warns her children, telling them not to be afraid as they pass a cemetery, “Evil comes from the living, not the dead.”

Reviewer: Hugh Pope, former Wall Street Journal correspondent in Istanbul, is the author of Sons of the Conquerors: the Rise of the Turkic World (Overlook Duckworth, 2005).