Short, concise and up to date

Despite the 5 stars, this book is not perfect. And one thing that readers may have a problem with, is the author’s seeming reverence towards IS. Furthermore, in a couple of years this book may well seem be dated and irrelevant. No doubt, in due time, more academic and thorough accounts of rise of the Islamic State will be available. But what this book does offer is a very accessable, very current account of ISs success and the West’s failure to see it coming. The rise of IS has been swift to say the least, so the fact that this books reads like a running commentory to IS’s expansion is an increadable achievement (I write this on 19th Feb, 2015). Due to the haste that this book must have been written in, any oversights on the part of the author are forgivable.