This short and elegantly written book manages the extraordinarily difficult feat of presenting the reader with a lucid introduction to Shiism in the Middle East that is at the same time full of penetrating insights. There is nothing quite like it in print, and I should state immediately that the book richly deserves translation and publication in English. Avoiding a prose that is either excessively general or too detailed, it will just as easily serve the needs of undergraduate teaching as of policymaking, and even offers ideas for specialists, particularly in the concluding chapter. Dealing with Shiism in the Middle East as a whole, rather than following the standard procedure of splitting it between Iranian and Arab versions, Louer's book looks at the sect's political transformation after the Islamic Revolution and the fall of Baathist Iraq, paying particular attention to the changing role of the clergy, the rise of lay authorities, and transnational patterns of religious thought and practice that cannot be divided by neatly marked national categories. All of this leads to the apparently paradoxical conclusion that the success of Shii politics results in the slow marginalization of the clerical class and the rise to prominence of lay figures who are in many ways far more "religious" than the divines, especially in their concern with messianic and other eschatological themes. While Louer is surely correct in seeing the emergence of a lay leadership as an example of the way in which Shiism is taking on an increasingly Sunni countenance, the interest in eschatology is surely more attuned to movements among the Christian laity (Catholic and Protestant), though there is probably no direct causal relationship to be found between them. While her focus on the Middle East quite legitimately allows Louer to ignore the vast Shii populations of South Asia, it would have been interesting to learn something about the way in which they are tied into the world of Middle Eastern religious and political authority, not least as significant sources of funding for important figures like the Ayatullah Sistani.