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A review by bookishwendy
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson
3.0
Author Ronson delves as best he can, interviewing sketchy sources and conspiracy theorists, into the Army's highly classified, defunct (and possibly completely fictitious) First Earth Battalion, that in the early 1980s taught New Age techniques of telepathy to try to create a new type of post-Vietnam peace-loving supersoldier...who may just be able to stare goats to death.
Contrary to my usual procedures, I saw the film first when it came out back in 2009, and only just got around to the book now. And while I liked the book well enough for its quirky Jon Ronsonness, it's just a little too disjointed, the facts too shaky, and while many of the little anecdotes are quite interesting on their own (torture by Barney the Dinosaur, the CIA's ill-fated experiments with LSD as truth serum, the Heaven's Gate cult) none of the threads came together at the end in any meaningful way. I don't remember the film all that well except that it's not really like the book at all--yet I liked it better. I think this is because the film does try to build a story out of the book's disparate segments.
This is a fun little bit of pop-journalism, though I prefer Ronson's more recent book [b:The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry|9378733|The Psychopath Test A Journey Through the Madness Industry|Jon Ronson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1307825196s/9378733.jpg|14262366].
Contrary to my usual procedures, I saw the film first when it came out back in 2009, and only just got around to the book now. And while I liked the book well enough for its quirky Jon Ronsonness, it's just a little too disjointed, the facts too shaky, and while many of the little anecdotes are quite interesting on their own (torture by Barney the Dinosaur, the CIA's ill-fated experiments with LSD as truth serum, the Heaven's Gate cult) none of the threads came together at the end in any meaningful way. I don't remember the film all that well except that it's not really like the book at all--yet I liked it better. I think this is because the film does try to build a story out of the book's disparate segments.
This is a fun little bit of pop-journalism, though I prefer Ronson's more recent book [b:The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry|9378733|The Psychopath Test A Journey Through the Madness Industry|Jon Ronson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1307825196s/9378733.jpg|14262366].