Highlanders

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The remote mountain region of the Caucasus has little in common with the contemporary West. Yet this history draws a compelling link between the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and a selection of national heroes ranging from William Wallace to William Tell and from Prometheus to Geronimo. They share, suggests Karny, "an astounding perseverance a dogged sense of pride irrational pursuits of liberty." These, he writes, are the characteristics of mountain-dwellers, whose attitude is shaped by altitude and whose chivalrous folklore has been co-opted by imperial plain-dwellers from Boston to London to Moscow. It is through this topographical lens that Karny presents the complex microcosm of the Caucasus. Here, in a region half the size of Kentucky, are registered 46 distinct nations, speaking an even greater number of languages. Among them are the Circassians, whose military prowess make them world-famous mercenaries; the Kumyk, whose nascent nationalist movement is the first in the former Soviet Union to be spearheaded by women; the Laks, whose banishment to the lowlands by the Bolsheviks in 1920 nearly destroyed them as a nation; and of course the Chechens, whose armed resistance to Russian rule has reduced their cities to rubble and yanked the Caucasus from international obscurity. Karny muddies his portrait with a self-conscious attempt to connect with his subjects, calling his book a "quest of memory" (as the descendant of Polish Jews, Karny feels he was subjected to memory desensitization by Israeli propaganda). But, fortunately, his philosophical ponderings are overshadowed by his scrupulous journalism and passionate plea that these endangered nations be helped to survive the 21st century's globalization.

Library Journal

Israeli journalist Karny has made several visits to the Caucasus, that mountainous tangle of conflicting ethnic groups that lies between the Caspian and Black seas. This is the land of the Kabardins, Chechens, Cossacks, Georgians, Daghesjanis, Armenisans, Azerbijans, and others. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, this transition area between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East has been disintegrating into chaos and tragedy. The book, which the author completed in the fall of 1999 when the Russian-Chechen conflict was again heating up, provides considerable background of a region that is important to world stability but poorly understood and overlooked. Unfortunately for us all, Karny can offer little hope. The bibliographic essay provides a number of web sites for those wanting to keep up with the changes taking place. Most libraries should purchase this book.

Colin Thubron

I doubt if any Westerner understands the political scenery of the post-Soviet Caucasus better than Karny, or has gathered and deployed his knowledge with such courage and sympathy.
—The New York Times Book Review

New Yorker

No region of the former U.S.S.R. has been as difficult to get a handle on as the Caucasus, but Karny, an Israeli journalist, manages to do so in four hundred dense, digressive pages...he offers a solid and sometimes brilliant primer for a maddeningly elusive region.