Engel (chief foreign correspondent, NBC News) knew from a young age that he wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and he moved to Cairo, Egypt, as a 22-year-old Stanford University graduate to live out that dream. He met members of the 1990s Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which was operating as a parallel government to that of Hosni Mubarak. Engel covered the breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the Iraq War, the Israeli war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Arab Spring. Most important, here he tackles the origins of ISIS, which he saw forming during his career, and its origins that are hundreds of years old. He stays nonpartisan by criticizing mistakes made by both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations that led to further Middle East destabilization in the 2000s. Chapters begin with maps of the area Engel is writing about and the major cities. A further reading section would have enhanced the work. Verdict An excellent resource for those who want to understand Middle East unrest and the ISIS terrorism threat without being Middle East scholars-there is no baseline knowledge required to learn from and appreciate Engel's work. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]-Jennifer M. Schlau, Elgin Community Coll., IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* As a print and broadcast journalist with his own boots on the ground in the Middle East for more than 20 years, Engel has seen it all: sectarian violence and civil uprisings, stealth kidnappings and terrorist beheadings, the fall of dictators and the rise of rebel warlords. Now Engel takes a long view, not only of his career trajectory from struggling stringer straight out of Stanford to bureau chief and chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, but also of the genesis of the ancient conflicts that form the foundation of contemporary unrest in a diverse and divisive region. His grasp of Middle East history is encyclopedic, yet Engel distills the major tenets of geopolitical and religious conflict into comprehensible and comprehensive terms. His professional and personal witness to everything from the arrest of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt to the execution of Saddam Hussein in Iraq brings an immediacy to globe-altering events and provides an authenticity that transcends the in-harm's-way reportage that has earned him journalism's highest honors. Clear, candid, and concise, Engel's overview of the ongoing battleground should be required reading for anyone desiring a thorough and informed portrait of what the past has created and what the future holds for the Middle East and the world at large.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist

A deft personal account of a career spent reporting from the Middle East, witnessing the evaporation of peace and stability. NBC chief foreign correspondent Engel (War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, 2008, etc.) takes a confident, thorough approach to this fusion of memoir and journalistic narrative, beginning with evolutionary overviews of both Islam and the modern Middle East. Looking back, he concludes that his own youthful, improvisational journalistic beginnings in Egypt in 1997 coincided with the impending downfall of dictators like Saddam Hussein. "Saddam was the first of the Arab big men to go," he writes. In cleanly structured chapters, the author explores his reporting during particular flash points, beginning with ominous early examples of fundamentalist terrorism, through the Syrian war and the spread of the Islamic State group, illustrating a harsh thesis of entropy fueled by successive American administrations: "Bush's aggressive interventionism and Obama's timidity and inconsistency completely destroyed the status quo." Engel's personalized viewpoint supports this claim, presenting a coherent episodic narrative alongside his own high-risk career. He was offered a position as Palestinian-affairs correspondent for a French press agency in time to witness the violent Second Intifada. From there, he often wound up in harm's way, as when he found himself the last American correspondent in Baghdad at the outset of the second Iraq War, leading to employment as a foreign correspondent for ABC. The depth of Engel's experience is clear, yet his boldness may have led to an overconfidence that contributed to his 2012 kidnapping in Syria. "Those [experiences] gave me a false sense of security, and I guess I got greedy," he writes. "In journalism, you never want to get greedy." Engel seems capable and likably frank, in contrast to his pessimistic conclusions: "A lot of killing remains to be done before leaders of stature emergeand before the fires of chaos are tamped down once again." An intriguing journalistic memoir built around a lucid, alarming overview of where the Middle East has been and where it is heading. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.