Reviews and Comments

The genesis of the book was from Hasting's article on General McChrystal, which led to McChrystal's almost immediate firing by Obama. This book goes over the setup and follow through of how that article was written -- how the various players were set up, and how Hastings ended up spending far more time with the McChrystal team than he was supposed to after the Iceland Volcano eruption halted all air travel in Europe.

Hastings uses simple, precise language wherever he can, and keeps his sentences on point and unambiguous. He's clearly comfortable in military situations while still finding ways to escape "the bubble" and he's not fazed by high ranking officials. As such, his reporting is surprisingly levelheaded even in situations where you expect a haliography -- rather than writing about 7 foot tall man gods who stride the world and quote Latin, he talks about war geeks with severe cases of ADD that are carefully managed by their handlers. More impressively, Hastings is not afraid to discuss the sunk costs in the war that has McChrystal asking for more and more troops even while everyone around him says that Afghanistan is unwinnable.

It's a good read, and it neatly humanizes a number of high ranking officials and shows how politics can work at that level.

For another take on the book (with some rather acid comments about lazy journalism), read www.annrachelmarlowe.com/2012/01/09/afghan-noir-review-of-michael-hastings-the-operators-in-the-daily/

So the protagonist wakes up with amnesia into a complex and deadly situation. This in principle isn't different from Memento or Jason Bourne or many other situations, but there are two things that make this far more entertaining -- Myfanwy Thomas is a female bureaucrat who has no combat skills, and in her previous life, she knew that her memory would be gone and so left notes for her amnesiac self, who is none too happy to be dropped in the middle of this.

But that's the first third of the novel. What makes this book interesting is how English it is. Even in the face of danger, Thomas and the agency she works for are remarkably calm and composed -- what disturbs Thomas is emotional betrayal and the violation of "good manners" and protocol between different organizations. Unfortunately, this is carried too far in a couple of cases, and there were some plot points which I found frankly unbelievable and reckless for Thomas to have engaged in, and there are points in the book where the work the agency does is written for giggles and humor. The introduction of the Vampire into the agency in particular is just absolutely unbelievable. I don't give a fuck how valuable he is, someone who kills three hundred people in your agency before he even says hello is not to be trusted.

That being said, it's an enjoyable and unpredictable read, and there are white knuckle terrors that can rival Charles Stross's little mise en scenes.

When I started this book, I was worried it was going to be a woo-woo description of how people really feel and how everything could be better if we could open up to one another.

Which is technically true -- it is about how people feel, and it is about opening up. But it's much better than you would expect, because it focuses on how the organization of companies results in very different experiences for people in the organization. He describes "anthropologists" who are studying a company and attending all of the meetings going over the unexpected and extreme reactions of individuals in an organization... and then goes back through the notes and the structure of the system as a whole to show that the organization itself was putting intense pressure on the individual even though each of the individuals in that organization thought they were behaving rationally.

In some sense, it reminds me of another book, The Deadline. However, it's much better for its simplicity and its diagrams... it doesn't talk about delivering software, and it doesn't talk about deadlines. It talks about what power and responsibility does to people and how people react to the use of it.

Not just recommended, but one of the books I really wish I'd read when I took my first job.