Montreal Gazette, Canada Jan 10 2004 -- It's been a tough 15 years for this new-old nation in the south caucasus, as its people have faced war, an earthquake and the challenges of independence.

LEVON SEVUNTS Freelance

The past 15 years have been some of the most challenging and momentous in Armenia's millennia-old history. The tiny country in the South Caucasus has lived through a devastating earthquake, become an independent nation, fought and won a major war, suffered through several ice-storm-like winters and seen a huge outmigration, with almost one-third of its pre-1990 population of 3.5 million thought to have emigrated.

In the midst of all that, Armenia has also managed to transform its economy from a centrally planned Soviet system into an IMF-approved robber-capitalist model and is struggling to build a liberal democracy.

Yet, remarkably, very little has been written about this crucial period. Apart from a few travel books where Armenia gets a passing mention, the only other English-language book that offers a view from the inside and a serious analysis of this crucial period is Gerald J. Libaridian's The Challenge of Statehood: Armenia's Political Thinking Since Independence. Libaridian, a former adviser to the first Armenian president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, paints a picture of the political and geopolitical challenges facing the fledgling nation.

Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope by the husband-and-wife team of Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, for its part, offers remarkable insight into how ordinary Armenians have been affected by the politics of transition from socialism to capitalism and the geopolitics of this complex region.

The Millers find an extraordinary way to tell the story by giving voice to Armenians from all walks of life: earthquake survivors, refugees, war widows and orphans, soldiers and economic migrants. The book is based on more than 300 interviews for a sociological research project, conducted by the Millers and their team during the traumatic events of 1993 and 1994.

The first chapter deals with the experiences of the survivors of the Dec. 7, 1988, earthquake, which killed more than 25,000 Armenians and destroyed about 40 per cent of Armenia's industrial capacity.

The second chapter tells the stories of Armenian survivors of pogroms in the Azerbaijani cities of Sumgait and Baku between 1988 and 1990.

The third chapter takes the readers behind the headlines of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and examines the impact of the war on soldiers and civilians alike.

Chapter 4 describes the experiences of Armenians living in the capital, Yerevan, as they queued in endless breadlines and struggled to survive harsh winters with only an hour or so of electricity a day for most of the early 1990s.

The fifth and the sixth chapters are more analytical and pose fundamental questions, not the least among them: "Was independence worth it?"

The Millers leave that question for readers to answer but the epilogue offers a hint.

Written after a visit to Armenia in 2001, this book paints a picture of a recovering nation and offers hope that Armenia's second experiment with independence in the 20th century (the first was the short-lived Republic of Armenia between 1918 and 1920) might yet work out.

The Millers display both a tremendous empathy for their subject and an almost clinical detachment, which gives the book the emotional charge of a first-hand account and the authority of a research paper.

Although literary style is not among the book's strong points, it's an engaging read and the heart-wrenching testimonies of interviewees can't fail to move the reader.

And what the book lacks in literary eloquence is more than compensated by the wonderful photographs by Jerry Berndt, providing a powerful visual testimony.

Despite their obvious attachment to Armenia, the Millers manage to avoid the trap of romanticizing the struggle of nation-building. There is nothing glorious in accounts and pictures of people lining up for bread or scavenging for wood in city parks, and nothing romantic in stories of women and children who have lost their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers on the battlefields of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Even though the book was written with the almost million-strong North American Armenian diaspora in mind, it could be of interest to anybody who wants to know more about the volatile South Caucasus. It would certainly be very valuable for students of history, political science and sociology of the former Soviet Union.

Levon Sevunts is a former Gazette reporter who lived in Armenia during the period described in the book.