Since Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, ter­ror­ism has been an almost dai­ly sta­ple of the news and of instant analy­sis books. Yet, most peo­ple can­not tell the dif­fer­ent ter­ror­ist groups apart and under­stand lit­tle of the com­plex his­tor­i­cal back­ground of Mid­dle East ter­ror­ism. Aaron Mannes has done a remark­able job of sum­ma­riz­ing a wide range of sources on the sev­en major ter­ror­ist net­works in the Mid­dle East: Al Qae­da, Abu Nidal, Hamas, Hizbul­lah, Kur­dis­tan Work­ers’ Par­ty, Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad, and the PLO and its affil­i­ates. Each of the chap­ters is divid­ed into sec­tions on his­to­ry, tac­tics, major oper­a­tions, etc., with a par­tic­u­lar focus on the inter­na­tion­al links between dif­fer­ent ter­ror­ist groups. The book does not make for easy read­ing: although well-writ­ten and jar­gon-free, Mannes’s prog­no­sis is that — to para­phrase Win­ston Churchill — we are not only not at the begin­ning of the end, but we might not yet even be at the end of the begin­ning. Bib­lio., chron., index.