I will never stop marveling at authors who attempt to tell the story of the Middle East post-World War II. The sheer amount of names, armies, militias, and murderous tyrants is enough to make a book daunting even for the reader. Kim Ghattas decided that isn’t enough and adds a true crime angle to her excellent Best Kind of American. Nothing like upping your own difficulty level.
That said, I don’t want to mislead anyone that this reads like a general true crime book. Neither does Ghattas, who immediately tells the reader that the assassination of Malcolm Kerr (the NBA’s Steve Kerr’s father) can’t be told like traditional true crime. Instead, you need to know all the players, their motivations, and their willingness to kill anyone who gets in their way.
What unfolds is a series of betrayals, murders, failures, and short-lived successes for everyone involved, and I mean everyone. It is a true quagmire of epic proportions that we are still dealing with today. Ghattas tells the story of the region before and after Kerr’s assassination and does so with some editorializing. Generally, I want my history told with the minimum possible, but Ghattas is willing to call out anyone and everyone within the narrative. No one is a white knight above the fray. Everyone involved at some point ends up with blood on their hands. I found Ghattas’s willingness to break the veil of a totally impartial observer helped me engage more with the text overall. I may not have always agreed with her interpretations, but I always understood where she was coming from. More importantly, it made me question my own point of view.
I would recommend this to anyone who wants to understand more about the region during this time period. However, be ready to be challenged by a story that never stops twisting. As you can tell by turning on any news program right now, this story is far from finished.
(This book was provided as a review copy by Henry Holt and Co.)
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