Posted: 3/15/2011 1:37:35 PM EDT
|
I'm about 2/3 through The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, by "Ishmael Jones" (pseudonym). It's been excellent so far, but paints a pretty bleak picture of what a bloated bureaucracy the CIA has become, and the dim prospects for real HUMINT acquisition. Jones is a prior-service Marine officer who spent 15 years in the CIA clandestine service, then resigned while in good standing, wrote the book and submitted it for approval to CIA censors and received no reply. They sued him last year over publication, although so far I've read nothing that even sniffs of methods or sources. I think it just paints a very damning portrait of how things work there in Langley. I recommend it.
Next up on deck, I have Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental, by Marc Gerstein. I have to admit that I have something of a fascination with disaster analysis. |
|
I will add it to the pile, anything that gets that sort of response must be hitting the right notes. Have you read Uncertain Shield by Richard Posner or Spying Blind by Amy Zegart?
as far as disaster related stuff, check out Catastrophe: Risk and Response, also by Posner (the guy publishes every few months) or The Next Catastrophe by Charles Perrow. I would be happy to lend you any of them. |
| I'm just getting started on Flirting With Disaster, but it's got a political bent to it that I'm finding a bit unpalatable. The co-author is Michael Ellsberg, and his brother Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, wrote the foreword and afterword. There is already, early on in the book, some finger pointing from the left toward the right. We'll see how far this goes, I guess. |
| I just finished Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales. It's a good read and covers a lot of different survival episodes, including lost in the woods, lost at sea, stranded on a mountain and folks in the World Trade Center on 9/11. He goes into mindset and what qualities and abilities lend themselves to survival. I recommend it. |
|
Next up, or halfway through anyway: Taliban, by Ahmed Rashid. Rashid is a Pakistani journalist who now writes for the WaPo, BBC and IHT.
The original was written in 2000, and this is the second edition that includes an additional chapter covering the years 2000-2010. He gives a pretty straightforward version of where the original taliban (madrassa students) came from and how they became a factor in Afghanistan, as well as what they later became. Bin Laden is also covered, as is the oil pipeline possibilities and how that has played into events there. Very interesting so far, and I recommend it to broaden the reader's knowledge base on the current conflict. |
| I picked up The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, the other day while passing through an airport, and read it in about a day and a half. Lewis gives a very understandable and clear education on the mortgage-backed securities/collateralized debt obligation/credit default swap mess that slammed into the US economy in 2007/2008, as well as some of the people and entities involved. He tells the story in conjunction with the stories of a few people who saw the absurdity of the securitization of mortgages and the belief that housing values could never fall or even plateau, and how they managed to bet on that very thing (going short on those bonds). I recommend it. |
| Ironically, I just finished reading From Pablo to Osama by Michael Kenney on Sunday afternoon. I didn't care for the author's conclusions, but it's some of the best analysis I've read on criminal networking. |