It certainly put the problems of the Mideast in a more personal perspective as the reader follows the life of Mosab Hassan Yousef for ten years of his life. ( )

This is a fantastic and much needed read in today's climate. I found Mosab's story to be heartbreaking & courageous.... If only more people could see things the way he does. This book gave me ample insight into the Palestine-Israel conflict that I didn't have before and this should be a mandatory read for ANYONE who is protesting or speaking up for EITHER side. Not only is it insightful, it is a page turner, gripping you in until the very end. Highly recommend! ( )

a compelling story undone by repetitiveness and confusing political stances. ( )

This is the third of the four books I borrowed from the library and it is one that I haven't heard of before. This surprised me because I often read military memoirs of various types. I have read quite a few books about the IDF, Mossad and Shin Bet but none about Hamas so I was looking forward to this a lot.

The book starts with a quick account of Yousef's early life and it becomes obvious very quickly how much he admires his father. There isn't a huge amount of depth in this part of the book but this is a good thing in my opinion. I often feel like that some books use early life accounts to pad out the pages when in reality all I want to read about is the good stuff.

The next major incident that involves Yousef is his arrest by the IDF. At this point he talks about his anger towards Israel but somehow it just doesn't sound convincing. I am sure that he was very angry at the time but he doesn't manage to put this into words.

Everything that follows and his involvement with Shin Bet is fascinating and its a minor miracle that they managed to hide his activities so well. After a while he probably had more access to Hamas information than anyone else and yet was also the most useful information course for Israel. This part of the book was the best part in my opinion and I would happily have read a book with only this info in it.

The main reason that I have given this book 3 stars is the preachy nature of his conversion from Islam to Christianity. He dismisses pretty much everything that he previously believed and then really labours the point that Christianity is the only religion which is right. This really started to annoy me after a while. I find religion a really interesting subject and they all tend to have good and bad points. This is an opinion that Yousef does not seem to share sadly.

Another aspect which I didn't like is that he is very quick to condemn everything that Hamas was involved in whilst never questioning the validity of Israeli actions. Terrorism and death is horrible but he condemns deaths caused by Hamas whilst not applying the same standards to Israeli action which ended with the deaths of innocent people. ( )

The writing is only average and obviously it is somewhat slanted but it is definitely worth reading. ( )