For half a century, the case of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York intellectual brutally murdered in 1947 on Stalin s orders, remained hidden in the secret files of the Soviet and American intelligence services a footnote buried in the rubble of the Cold War. It surfaced briefly in 1992, when Boris Yeltsin handed over a dossier to the White House, but the full story of what happened remained a mystery. After eight years of international sleuthing, Andrew Meier at last reveals the truth in The Lost Spy Oggins was one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviets."

The barbaric, terrorist siege in the summer of 2004 that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent children in Beslan did not begin either there or in the take-over of a Moscow theatre in 2002. As Andrew Meier explains in this utterly compelling account, the most recent Chechen war actually broke out on New Year's Eve in 1994 when Boris Yeltsin sent hundreds of tanks to the center of the city of Grozny in an effort to quell popular demands for independence from Russia. Six years later, Meier, braving great personal danger, traveled to the scene of one of the largest civilian massacres carried out by Russian troops, reporting on the carnage in which over 60 Chechen civiliansincluding a pregnant woman and many elderlywere brutally slaughtered in one of the war's most horrific "mop-up" operations. Days after a Chechen woman became the conflict's first female suicide bomber, Meier visited this war-torn province, encountering, among others, kidnappers, Wahhabi Islamists aligned with the Taliban, and a stream of Russian mothers arriving at the morgue to identify their fallen soldier sons. Chechnya is Meier's stunning report from a region where the death toll has already exceeded 100,000 people, and a book that attempts to comprehend what compels men to shoot children in the back.

"A compassionate glimpse into the extremes where the new Russia meets the old," writes Robert Legvold ("Foreign Affairs") about Andrew Meier's enthralling new work. Journeying across a resurgent and reputedly free land, Meier has produced a virtuosic mix of nuanced history, lyric travelogue, and unflinching reportage. Throughout, Meier captures the country's present limbo a land rich in potential but on the brink of staggering back into tyranny in an account that is by turns heartrending and celebratory, comic and terrifying. A 2003 New York Public Library Book to Remember. ""Black Earth" is the best investigation of post-Soviet Russia since David Remnick's "Resurrection." Andrew Meier is a truly penetrating eyewitness." Robert Conquest, author of "The Great Terror"; "If President Bush were to read only the chapters regarding Chechnya in Meier's "Black Earth," he would gain a priceless education about Putin's Russia." Zbigniew Brzezinski "Even after the fall of Communism, most American reporting on Russia often goes no further than who's in and who's out in the Kremlin and the business oligarchy. Andrew Meier's Russia reaches far beyond . . . this Russia is one where, as Meier says, history has a hard time hiding. Readers could not easily find a livelier or more insightful guide." Adam Hochschild, author of "King Leopold's Ghost" and "The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin" "From the pointless war in Chechnya to the wild, exhilarating, and dispiriting East and the rise of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer it's all here in great detail, written in the layers the story deserves, with insight, passion, and genuine affection." Michael Specter, staff writer, "The New Yorker"; co-chief, "The New York Times" Moscow Bureau, 1995-98. " Meier's] knowledge of the country and his abiding love for its people stands out on every page of this book....But it is his linguistic fluency, in particular, which enables Mr. Meier to dig so deeply into Russia's black earth." "The Economist" "A wonderful travelogue that depicts the Russian people yet again trying to build a new life without really changing their old one." William Taubman, "The New York Times" Book Review."