Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars

by Nicholas Griffin

Release Date: March, 2003

Edition: Hardcover

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Revealing

I've always felt much safer following novelists into non-fiction than say biographers, or historians into the realms of fiction. Griffin, who has written a couple of historical novels, is on familiar, though foreign ground. His fictional stories seem to examine cruelty and hope and his first work of non-fiction is no exception. It's a mixture of many genres, all neatly rolled into a short, decisive book. The Caucasus is one of those places, much like the Balkans, which used to confuse me to the point where I'd rather turn the page. But Griffin keeps everything simple and clear, following myths, history and politics along the lines of an expanding Christian nation (Russia) and a defensive Islamic nation (what came to be called Chechnya, Dagestan and Azerbaijan). This book is obviously more topical than the author thought when starting it four years ago. My only complaint is in the inclusion of the author's own travels. At first, it didn't feel as if they merited belonging, but once you catch the writer's drift, that everything is really very close to how it was two hundred years ago, his aims become more and more apparent. Caucasus is blessedly easy to read, and that's no mean feat.