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“Any tool that can help students overcome the inability to imagine other lands and peoples is worth its weight in gold. I’m happy to report that I have discovered just such a teaching aid in Khassan Baiev’s Grief Of My Heart: A Surgeon Under Fire.” Read full review  Class syllabus
-- Professor Brian Williams, History Department,
University of Massacusetts at Dartmouth

Doctor Khassan Baiev has written an excellent autobiography which accurately describes life in Chechnya, the centuries-long struggle for independence and self-rule, as well as the origins of the wars with Russia and their human cost. This volume will make a fine contribution to any university course on human-rights abuses in wartime. 
-- John Dunlop, Historian and Researcher,
The Hoover Institution, Palo Alto, California

Witness testimony is often the best way to move a student to a deeper understanding of the human tragedy of war. Khassan Baiev’s The Oath: A Surgeon under Fire is the first book-length memoir published in English that illuminates the human cost of the wars in Chechnya. A poignant story of the ways in which human conscience can cross the frontiers of ethnicity and religion, Baiev illustrates the complexity of moral choice when daily life is fractured by war. 
-- Professor Emma Gilligan, Department of History, University of Chicago

Student praise:

“A powerful first-person account.”  - Josh Dubroff, UMass at Dartmouth

“The best book I read in college.”  - Mercy Bell, UMass at Dartmouth