Citation
C.J. Chivers arrived in Beslan soon after its elementary school had been attacked by Chechen terrorists in August 2004. Over the next 18 months, he returned again and again, on weekends, on vacation, determined to tell the definitive story of how 362 people, many of them children, ended up dying there. He interviewed some survivors in sessions lasting as long as 10 hours. His goal, he said, was to create the first "wide-lit narrative of the event." In reporting the story, Chivers acknowledged later, he was "essentially obsessed." The result of his obsession was a gripping 18,000-word, hour-by-hour account that both contradicts the official story of the Beslan hostage crisis and illuminates man's capacity for good and evil. Or, as Esquire put it, "an extraordinary accounting of the experience of terror in the age of terrorism."

Excerpt
The School
June 2006
Kazbek Misikov stared at the bomb hanging above his family. It was a simple device, a plastic bucket packed with explosive paste, nails, and small metal balls. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. The existence of this bomb had become a central focus of his life. If it exploded, Kazbek knew, it would blast shrapnel into the heads of his wife and two sons, and into him as well, killing them all.
Throughout the day he had memorized the bomb, down to the blue electrical wire linking it to the network of explosives the terrorists had strung around them hours before. Now his eyes wandered, panning the crowd of more than eleven hundred hostages who had been seized in the morning outside the school. The majority were children, crouched with their parents and teachers on the basketball court. The temperature had risen with the passing hours, and their impromptu jail had become fetid and stinking with urine and fear. Many children had undressed. Sweat ran down their bare backs.
His eyes settled on his captors. Most of the terrorists had left the gym for defensive positions in the main school building, leaving behind a handful of men in athletic suits or camouflage pants. These were their guards. They wore ammunition vests and slung Kalashnikov rifles. A few were hidden behind ski masks, but as the temperature had risen, most had removed them, revealing faces. They were young. Some had the bearing of experienced fighters. Others seemed like semiliterate thugs, the sort of criminal that had radiated from Chechnya and Russia's North Caucasus during a decade of war. Two were women wearing explosive belts.
Kazbek studied the group, committing to memory their weapons, their behavior, their relations to one another, and the configuration of their bombs. A diagram of their handiwork had formed in his head, an intricate map that existed nowhere else. With it was a mental blueprint of the school, in which he had studied as a boy. This was useful information, if he could share it, and Kazbek thought of fleeing, hoping he might give the Special Forces gathering outside a description of the bombs and defenses. Already Kazbek assumed this siege would end in a fight, and he knew that when Russia's soldiers rushed these rooms, their attack would be overpowering and imprecise. He knew this because he once was a Russian soldier himself.

Biography
C.J. Chivers is a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times and a regular contributor to Esquire. After graduating from Cornell University in 1988, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served in the Persian Gulf War. Honorably discharged in 1994 with the rank of captain, Chivers entered the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, graduating in 1995 as valedictorian. He began his writing career at the Providence Journal, and joined the Times in 1999 as a metro reporter, covering crime and law enforcement. He was in downtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001, and witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center. For the next twelve days he remained on the site. Since then, Chivers has also reported from Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, and Russia. Chivers, 42, lives in Moscow with his wife, Suzanne Keating, and their four children.