Ratings34
Average rating3.5
"A jaw-dropper of a non-fiction story. It moves with wry, precise agility." The New York Times In 1979, a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known military practice - and indeed the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt a cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. They were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting George Bush's War on Terror. Often funny, sometimes chilling and always thought-provoking, journalist Jon Ronson's Sunday Times bestseller The Men Who Stare at Goats is a story so unbelievable it has to be true. PRAISE FOR THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS "Not only a narcotic road trip through the wackier reaches of Bush's war effort, but also an unmissable account of the insanity that has lately been done in our names" Observer "Funny and gravely serious, what emerges is a world shrouded in secrecy, mystery and wackiness, where Warrior Monks and psychic spies battle it out for military thinking. Mind-blowing stuff" Metro "Few more earnest investigative journalists would have had the brilliant bloody-mindedness to get what he has got and hardly any would have the wit to present it with as much clarity." The Observer "Simultaneously frightening and hilarious." The Times "A hilarious and unsettling book." The Boston Globe
Reviews with the most likes.
It's not as good as Them, but there are parts of this book that are just as funny and just as chilling. It just doesn't hold the same quality throughout.
This has been on my “someday I will get around to it” to-read list for almost 20 years, and I'm really not sure why. It was strange and disturbing, and I am now even more worried about the world we live in than I was before I read it. Also, the audiobook was read by the author himself and he just seemed gleeful about all this weird shit. I think I'll go back to books about plagues and mosquitoes killing mankind instead.
Meh. Incoherent, rambling and without any meaningful narrative drive. The short unconnected stories in Them are at least internally logical. Ronson is always witty and his prose easy to read, but just couldn't get into this.
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