"Newsweek correspondent Joshua Hammer has spent his adult life traveling the globe in search of important news stories - from Rwanda to Buenos Aires to, most recently, Kosovo. But in looking for root causes and solutions to problems in far-flung corners of the world, he managed to look away from an issue closer to home - namely his relationship with his brother, Tony, which had, for all intents and purposes, ended.".

"Years before, Tony who had been raised, along with his brother, Josh, in a non-religious Jewish family by sophisticated Manhattanites, had rejected all that by becoming an ultra-Orthodox Jew. His new life brought him an arranged marriage, then children, and days devoted exclusively to Torah study in a cloistered community in upstate New York.

This religious transformation was accompanied by an increasing intolerance for "outsiders," about whom he was vocal and, to Josh's ears, offensive, and an appearance and personality that were completely different from who he had been, as Josh discovers in their first visit in years.".

"In this extraordinary memoir, Joshua Hammer seeks to reconnect with his brother by following the path of his metamorphosis, from its apparent beginnings during a visit to Jerusalem, and then back to its real origins, in Hammer's own complex family network."--BOOK JACKET.