This underground classic tells the story of oil-rich Azerbaijan's first years of independence from Moscow. Thomas Goltz became an accidental witness to Azerbaijan's inglorious history-in-the-making when he was detoured into Baku in mid-1991 - and decided to stay. This record of his years there alternates in style between tragedy and farce. Throughout, the intensity of immediate experience is balanced by an acute awareness of contemporaneous events in Karabakh and Naxjivan, Georgia and Armenia, Russia and Chechnya, Iran and Turkey, Washington and Houston.