This book focuses mainly on the Muslim world: its history, religious origins, colonialism, etc. The struggles between secular-progressive movements and religious-authoritarian have a great relevance; the author clearly supports the first ones. In this struggle the influence of the west (specially the USA) is deemed negative by the author. However, against my expectations, the book is not an obsessive bash of the west.
There are a lot of endless chapters narrating Muslim intra-wars that don't seem to go anywhere; later the author simply states that he was trying to say that the monolithic conception on the Muslim world, very widespread in the west, is erroneous. He could have saved most of the Muslim history parts; some are incredibly unnecessary and make the book quite boring.
This was probably intended to be a book about political history of Islam but the editors thought it was better using an appealing title and a TalibanBush in the cover, hence the disappointment.
Interesting to have a closer look on the Muslim world.

I have to admit, with great shame, that I didn't realize how bad this was until the sex passages started. There, the book totally reveals itself as another of those Danielle Steele like easy-reading "romantic" books for housewives. The book is made of extremely intense micro-chapters, all of them contain an essential part of the story, necessary to the book: the skeleton of the history is the boom itself. It is extremely predictable and the characters act childishly like in some kind of bad soap opera. The main issues of this book are supposed to come from long ago but all of them resolve in 5 minutes scenes in extremely stupid conversations.