Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus
Social Science in the Caucasus reviews Thomas Goltz’s Georgia Diary: A Chronicle of War And Political Chaos in the Post-soviet Caucasus
[…] for those new to Goltz, Georgia Diary forms the third part of a trilogy of books about the Post-Soviet Caucasus, the first two covering the bad old times in the 1990s in Chechnya and Azerbaijan. This last addition to the trilogy differs from the other two in that it is written long after the events at the heart of the book took place. In that sense, it will not be quoted in the same way in academic circles as Goltz’s earlier books were. Though some take issue with the sometimes anecdotal style of Goltz’s accounts, his work is widely cited and he often speaks to academic audiences on the topic of Azerbaijan.
Though Georgia Diary, may be quoted by fewer academics, Goltz attempts to be much more academic than he was Azerbaijan Diary. But the academic part of the book is not the book’s strongest and seems to pale in comparison to Tony Anderson’s Bread and Ashes, where the academic background makes Anderson’s trek through the high Georgian Caucasus all the more delightful.
Nevertheless, Goltz’s unforgettable fast-paced writing returns when he recounts time spent in Sukhumi before and during and after the withdrawal of Georgian troops from Abkhazia. This is Goltz at his best and his work serves to highlight for many the multiple angles of the Georgian civil war and the difficulty in writing about it clearly or classifying well from an academic perspective what exactly was going on.
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[…] all in all, Goltz adds yet another readable volume, to what is now his trilogy on the Caucasus.
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