Here is a book project urgently crying out for US/UK English-language publisher. The book in question came out in French two weeks ago and swiftly made the bestseller lists over there. Amid a storm of media coverage, France’s top weekly newsmagazine, Nouvel Observateur put it on the cover – something they never do. It’s a heart-stopping look at the country’s secret anti-terrorist squads from the inside, for which the writer got himself embedded with one such team of seven members, four of them Muslims. All sans the knowledge or permission of the top brass… until the very last moment which almost squashed the entire venture. But it couldn’t be halted and hit the stands just in time to coincide with the recent video of ISIS leader Al Baghdadi back from the dead. In case it needs saying, France sits squarely on the front line in the struggle against Islamist terror and any news from the front concerns us all.

You’d have to redo the book’s title, a mouthful in English, though rather effective in the original: “Les Guerres De L’Ombre de la DGSI” roughly meaning “the secret wars of the general directorate of internal security”. That’s the French equivalent of the FBI or Britain’s MI6. Alex Jordanov is the author, a fifty-something Bulgarian-French-American journalist of storied background. The more polyglot reader might remember that he was kidnapped in 2004 by Iraqi militants while covering that war as a French journalist and by a hair’s breadth was subsequently restored to freedom. Born to Bulgarian parents, Jordanov grew up in Sofia, Paris and ultimately Berkeley, California, where his father landed a post in academe as a scientist. At age 19 Alex rather improbably co-launched a nightclub in the 1980s there with Ice-T that midwived the west coast rap scene. Ultimately, he became a journalist, TV personality and all round protean renaissance man.

Source: Forbes