Content tagged with “spies”

“This was a competent spy novel. It’s the start of a series and an attempt to define the ‘female James Bond’: Emma Makepeace. It wasn’t bad, but I get a little tired of how every female spy is always very close to their origin story. In this particular case, this is Emma’s first mission, and there…”

“About 50 pages into this, I was bored, and it seemed very similar to another book I had read. Sure enough, turns out Annie Jacobson wrote The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency . I’m just not a fan of her writing, I guess. The truth is…”

“So, here’s the problem with this book: the situation is ultimately just not that exciting. Yes, the movie was apparently great, and the set-up is amazing – diplomats hiding in a hostile country, escaping through disguise, etc. – but in the end, the CIA forged some documents and they all walked out….”

“ Fantastic, detailed history of the Cold War. covers all the bases, from World War I on, including quite a bit of coverage of India and Africa, outside of the big players – the U.S., Soviet Union, and China. Really, well done. 800 pages, but never got bogged down in it. ”

“This is the third Gabriel Allon novel I’ve read (there are presently 23 of them). It was probably the weakest of the three. There’s always an organizational villain. In the other novels , he demonized Israel and the Swiss banking industry. This time it’s the Catholic church – or a faction within…”

“This is Christian/Conservative spy fiction, if that’s even a thing? It’s perhaps telling that the cover has a praise quote from Rush Limbaugh, and there’s another from Sean Hannity on the inside flap. (The author was on Limbaugh’s payroll earlier in his career, apparently.) This is #4 in a…”

“This book was probably great back in 1965 or so when it was written, but it’s dated, 50 years later. There are several sections on the actual practice of intelligence, which may or may not less relevant today. Additionally, the communications revolution of the last 25 years has no-doubt changed a…”

“This is book two of the Gabriel Allon series, by Daniel Silva. This is another great spy novel – just as good as the first. This one concerns looted Jewish artwork, held in Switzerland. And just as I mentioned that Silva went hard on Israel in The Kill Artist , he goes twice as hard on the Swiss in…”

“This book is a tough one to read, for a few reasons. First, the dialog and descriptions are…lyrical? Pretentious? Long-winded? I don’t know how to describe it, but the author would never say something in one word if he could use 37 words instead. It’s like he knew he was writing a Very Important…”

“I bought this because it was recommended in a list of ‘steampunk novels,’ and I’ve always been a little interested in that genre. It’s… okay. First of all, an unbeknownst to me, it’s a young adult novel. Additionally, it seems to be targeted to teenage girls. Sophronia is a girl from a wealthy…”

“This is the inside story of The Plame Affair – the revelation that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, allegedly initiated by the Bush White House because Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, had been critical of the administration’s reasoning for starting the Iraq War. The most obvious part of this book is…”

“Interesting book written by a former CIA deputy director. It recounts the analysis of many problems in the intelligence world and dissects things like: how do we determine the correct question, how do we understand the correct drivers, how do we synthesize all the data, etc? It presents a six-step…”

“I abandoned this a ways in. It just didn’t hold my attention. From the praise quotes on the back, I gather the author is something of a legend of British intelligence. Weirdly, that becomes a weakness. Despite the subtitle, the book bogs down under stories. The author has an anecdote and a story…”

“incredibly well-researched look back at an obscure attempt to catalog scientific papers. Herbert Field was a man driven by a dream, but frustrated at every turn. This isn’t a success story, but it’s worth reading if you love library science or underdog stories. The ‘intrigue’ of the title is a…”

“This is a history book that answers the question: what did librarians do to help the war effort during World War II? Well, a lot it turns out. They amassed foreign periodicals and scoured them for intelligence information They captured and cataloged information left behind in German facilities…”

“This is an excellent spy novel. Years ago, I listened to quite a few of Daniel Silva’s novels on CD in the car. I remember really enjoying them, and always wanting to get back to them. I looked up the Gabriel Allon series (his most successful series), and found the first title in it (this one)….”

“I’ve read two other books in this series, and they’ve been amazing. This one was…less so. It reminded me of The Phantom Menace , which was a Star Wars movie that was more about political maneuvering than anything else. Someone said ‘it was like watching C-SPAN in space.’ Same thing here. It starts…”

“This is a first-rate political/military thriller. Some backstory: Joel Rosenberg wrote five books in the ‘Last Jihad’ series. Someone gave me book #4 – ‘The Copper Scroll’ – and I loved it . So, now I’m going back and reading the entire series from the start. The series has some controversy. It got…”

“Fifty pages into this, I was thinking ‘Man, I should never buy John Le Carre…’ His novels are so…so hard to follow, so… administrative . The book recovers a bit, though. It turns into a tragic love story, told in flashback. The book zips back and forth between the 60s and present day, telling a…”

“I bailed out of this just after the halfway point. I was looking for a spy thriller series to get into, but this just left me flat. There’s some poor writing here. Don’t bother forming your own opinions about anything, because the author will simply spoonfeed you what you’re supposed to think. It’s…”

“ One of the best novels I’ve ever read. Incredibly suspenseful with a fantastic payoff in the end. There’s a sentence 84% of the way through (according to my Kindle) that had me literally slack-jawed for about 60 seconds as my mind reeled with the implications. ”

“This is a role-playing game. I don’t really play role-playing games. I just read RPG rulebooks for fun. There’s probably some deep psychological reason for this – something about putting rules around imagination. No idea. (Watch this video some time: Theoretical Gamers VS Practical Gamers ) (Also,…”

“This is a weird and wonderful book. The author is a private investigator, and it seems he just decided to write a book one day about cases he’s worked on. And the book is really good . Each chapter details a separate case, and goes deep into details. You find that being a corporate PI is not about…”

“Wonderfully interesting overview of intelligence, from human spies to spy satellites to computer espionage. Peppered throughout are small case studies of actual historical situations (Manning, Snowden, Ames, the USS Liberty, etc.). Very enjoyable. My only gripe is that the author injects personal…”

“This is a story of a bunch of hacks, which the author has strung together. The claim is that NotPetya, WannaCry, the Korean Olympic hack, etc. were all the work of the same organization – a Russian GRU hacking group nicknamed ‘Sandworm’ (the name came from the book ‘Dune,’ from which there were…”

“This book is exactly what it claims – a magisterial history of intelligence and espionage. But, it left me a bit frustrated. (I wrote a blog post about this.) The book is a series of anecdotes, with no framework for understanding the larger issues of intelligence. It’s episodic – a series of…”

“This is the first novel in the Young Bond series. It covers James Bond in 1933 when he’s a 13-year-old boy at Eton. The date setting of the novel is actually never mentioned. I was trying to reverse-engineer it based on comments by the characters. Mentions of ‘the war’ had me thinking they were…”

“This is a British spy novel with a twist. The characters are all from MI5, but they’ve screwed up in one way or another and have been exiled to Slough House (pronounced ‘slaw’), which is a dingy remote office, away from the main MI5 office. They have to spend their days here, as a ‘slow horse,’…”

“I’m an old-school James Bond fan. I’ve read every original novel (the Fleming novels), and most the later novels (Gardener, Benson, and some others). I’ll come out and say it: this is the best non-Fleming Bond novel I’ve ever read. It’s divided into two parts. The first is Bond’s mission in a small…”

“This is a lovely overview of the U.S. Intelligence Community by a woman that teaches a course on it at Stanford. In fact, the book reads like a textbook (surprise – it is a textbook ) . Each chapter covers a different aspect of intelligence. For example: Analysis Counterintelligence Covert action…”

“This is two things: the story of for-profit spying in general, and the specific story of the ‘ Steele Dossier ’ that was compiled on Donald Trump prior to the 2016 election. As for the the general story, it’s a look at how investigative journalists often turn into spies-for-hire; essentially,…”

“I don’t know what to do with this book. I read it, but it’s tough to take it seriously in places. The author is ex-CIA. He runs a ‘school’ for spy survival, or something. He trains people in spy skills. He’s very…enthusiastic. He claims to carry two firearms with him at all times. He relays all…”

“This is a book that describes the U.S. intelligence community so that spy novel writers can describe it more accurately. Note the subtitle: How to Write Spy Novels, TV Shows and Movies Accurately and Not Be Laughed at by Real-Life Spies The book delivers on what it says – it’s a very stark…”

“Explanation and instruction on methods to examine intelligence or any body of information. Multiple exercises to minimize your chance of groupthink, blindness, or assumption. For maximum usage, this is the type of book you need to keep handy, as a reference. One reading will likely not be enough,…”

“This is a great book that I sort of wanted to write. About a year ago, I made this comment on the James Bond subreddit, in response to someone who called out the absurdity of the villain’s plan: I would really like to see an examination of James Bond films (and other films) for poor engineering and…”

“I read most of this book. I finally bailed on it towards the end. It’s a look inside the minds of Middle Eastern terrorists, and why they did what they did. I gathered that the author was assigned to some hospital in the Middle East, and had the opportunity to interview a bunch of them over time,…”

“Like the first book in the series, this is a fun spy novel. Emma Makepeace is a James Bond-ish woman working for a secret agency inside MI6. This one takes place largely on a yacht on the Cote D’Azur . There are scary Russians, commandos, spies, and intrigue. It’s not a dark or a deep novel….”

“This is the third book in the Emma Makepeace collection. If you remember, she’s a secret agent of sorts in a shadowy British organization. Like this other two, this is a fun novel. It’s not deep, but there’s a lot of good action and suspense, and it’s a nice way to pass time. In this entry,…”

“Entertaining, but not the best Bond I’ve read. It involves Bond racing at Le Mans, which is new, and there’s a very interesting post-script about how this was Ian Fleming’s idea, and Horowitz used Fleming’s notes for the basis of the first part of the story. The main plot is pretty fantastical. It…”

“Bellingcat is a ‘open source intelligence’ cooperative. It’s a group of people who surf the internet to find evidence of crimes. They made their name during the Syrian conflict. They would scour uploaded videos and compare them to Google Maps to find where they were taken. In doing so, they were…”