A work of true crime following one American family’s search for answers after a 1984 murder in war-torn Beirut, where the Iranian revolution collided with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, setting off the geopolitical conflagration that burns to this day.
Ghattas is well qualified to tease out the insidious relationships of ideology, convenience and betrayal that have condemned Lebanon to half a century of instability ... Amid the horrors, Ghattas gives us delicious images ... Ghattas’s assessments are shrewd ... If the best kind of American is one whose view of the Middle East is disinterested, benevolent and untainted by thoughts of commercial or strategic hegemony, Ghattas’s excellent book commemorates a breed that is all but extinct.
