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Whistle Stopper - Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
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List Price: $27.95
Our Price: $16.58
Your Save: $ 11.37 ( 41% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Doubleday
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.1273009
EAN: 9780385514453
ISBN: 038551445X
Label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 702
Publication Date: 2007-06-28
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: 2007-06-28
Studio: Doubleday
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
Comment: Once again Tim Weiner shows his bias and hatred against the intelligence community (and the U.S. in general) by cherry-picking data to support his theories of government ineptitude. He hasn't a clue as to the true dealings of the intelligence community (as it should be, even with the continuous leak of ongoing operations and activities by members of Congress). Tim Weiner needs to stick to interviewing spies like his buddy, Aldrich Ames (with whom he lied to jail officials in order to secure a personal interview even though Ames was under protective restraint to keep from divulging sensitive aspects of an ongoing investigation and prosecution). If nothing else, hopefully books by Weiner will confuse our adversaries as to our true capabilities.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good starting point for more investigation
Comment: The book traces the history of the CIA from conception to 2007. I didn't know much about the CIA going in and learned a lot by reading this book. If the author's correct, the CIA has almost without exception failed in its attempts to positively influence other countries and to gather intelligence. Moreover, many of the CIA's actions wound up resulting in huge numbers of lost lives and a world that's less safe. The employees of the CIA tend to be out-of-control cowboys, ambitious cynics, or incompetent bureaucrats. The author backs up his writing with over 100 pages of notes. But the story presented is so one-dimensionally negative that I also suspect it's not complete. This book covers about 70 years and a great many people so there may have been some cherry-picking. Still, if this book is used as an outline for further study (wikipedia was a constant companion for me), then it provides an interesting tour through many of the most important events of the last several decades.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Liberal Junk
Comment: I was looking for an accurate history of the CIA. What I read was liberal propaganda. Most everything written is negative in this book, which indicates immediately a strong bias.
I don't recommend this book at all.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Blunder after blunder
Comment: The citizens of our wonderful Country need to say their prayers everyday thanking the Good Lord that we, as a Nation, were able to survive as long as we have in spite of the worst decisonmakers and leaders in the Intelligence and Security arena of the world. Shame on the CIA!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Exceedingly well documented
Comment: A book which may change you read the daily news. Thoroughly researched and indexed, which very much adds to its value as a reference book. Gives a panoramic view of US behind-the-scenes involvement (at home as well as abroad) over the last half century and more on more fronts than one would have believed possible. One absolutely cringes at some of the crasser examples of "undercover" work. One certainly ends up wondering what the future will hold.
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Editorial Reviews:
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For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”
Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.
Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.
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