Great book and very interesting to those who’d like to know the culmination of events that lead to the unfolding of Lebanon’s 2019 economic crisis and the ensuing October 17 protests. Is Rafic Hariri the saint that our media paints him to be? No. So is he the devil that his critics claim he is? Also no! He was a businessman, a successful one, and a politician who was able to use wit and maneuvers to attain the highest office in Lebanon, in spite coming from a less than aristocratic background (spoiler alert: his money helped). Just a heads up to prospective readers: the author is somewhat biased, he does try to be objective but it’s fairly obvious that if you’re an avid supporter of Hariri’s Future movement, you’d have a difficult time accepting this book’s content, especially if your political stance is highly inflexible and you tend to be offended rather easily.
All in all, the book was a quick and easy read, sometimes it made me cringe due to the disastrous instances of corruption that I was reading about, some of which Lebanon will never recover from, and sometimes it was a true page turner due to the highly interesting reviews of the events from 1992 till 2005.