Tadish Durbin

The subject is fascinating, the research well-done and careful. The national security industry is, as we all had the sneaking suspicion, a gigantic scam, the details of which no-one without a security clearance will ever know. This includes your elected representatives in government.The sheer magnitude of this new industrial complex will make you laugh. Nervously.

My hound dog. A high-school student. A recent immigrant in their second week of ESL class. Any one of a number of well-qualifed narrators. Dana Priest's rendition of her own work is flat and dull. She often misses the punctuation and cadence of her own sentences. I'm not sure what it says about a book when the author cannot be bothered to read it so that it is expressive and engaging. She sounds like she's reading someone else's work for the first time.

Why the United States is spending billions of dollars on

Great subject, great book, lousy narration.

I have already listened to it a couple of times, not only is the information is compelling and interesting, but also because Maddow reads it, and does a great job.

Maddow presents a series of case studies illustrating the frustrating and sometimes alarming events that outline the elephant in the room that no one seems to want to address: the United States' ever-expanding militarism. I believe that unless we get a handle on this problem, the U.S. will wind up exactly like the USSR.

The author herself, because she's a tremendously compelling person.

Scheuer makes some very interesting points throughout this book, and one cannot help but take them into consideration. I respect his conclusions about how to deal with international terrorism. Unfortunately, I also feel that his lionization of Reagan and obvious disdain for Clinton make his conclusions harder to evaluate fairly. Often this book comes across as overly simplistic in its political analysis. That analysis being: Republicans good, and even when they are bad, they are still good, Democrats always bad and always worse than any Republicans.