The Way of the Strangers : Encounters with the Islamic State (Hardcover)

from LynnB

What is driving ISIS? And, more specifically, what is driving converts to join the movement? These are the questions explored by Gareme Wood in this book. The author interviews ISIS supporters from the U.S. and Australia, London and Japan. He tries to find out what the believe and how they think....

from dono421846

Can be considered an update of earlier work on Al Qaeda by Scott Atran, which ends in 2010. Wood gets us through October 2016, and focuses on the Al Qaeda successor ISIS. Although Atran writes as an ethnographic anthropologist, and Wood as a journalist, both favor in-depth descriptions of specifi...

from ben_a

Compelling non-fiction, driven by two deeply reported relationships and one good piece of detective work, although of course there is more here. Enlivened throughout by Wood's gallows humor. So the young lovers blissed out under the Texas sky, shrooming after the example of the prophet himself.

from iangreenleaf

I learned more about ISIS and radical Islam from this one book than I could have learned from decades of wall-to-wall "news" coverage on the topic.

from TheAmpersand

"The Way of the Strangers" isn't a complete history of ISIS, nor does it present a comprehensive theory of why it came to be. But it is a remarkable feat of reportage that provides real insight as to why people living comfortable lives in the West might be drawn to join what was perhaps the most ...