Reviews with content warning for Torture - The Men Who Stare at Goats

Reviews tagging 'Torture'

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson

7 reviews

linguisticali's review against another edition

dark fast-paced

1.5

Messy. A lot of this felt like conspiratorial free association, and the tongue in cheek tone really clashed with occasional descriptions of torture.

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everie's review

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adventurous challenging funny informative mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

3.75

My first journey into gonzo journalism! I'll have to give more a shot--a really interesting style of investigation.

Swings from legitimately funny to sad to depressing to "hey whatcha got there"

(Abu Ghraib) (Guantanamo Bay)

"a smoothie". Really knocked me for a loop in a positive way, thanks for the atrocity reminders, Ronson.

I don't completely buy his idea about how the mostly idealistic psychic soundwave ideas (lol) of the post-Vietnam 1970s ended up being used for torture (or more like sometimes I was intrigued and others it felt like he was trying really hard to make some unrelated dots connect--the torture itself was/is definitely happening) or his willingness to humor the claims of any supposed hamster heart-stopper with an email address, but it was a great, fun read that only got better as it went along. And included some definite truths about the ways the United States has and does mistreat prisoners and proclaimed 'bad guys' without a trial or a thought to human rights.

Also Art Bell mention!

And then the Heaven's Gate connection destroyed me

Wow.

I hope there is actually a slightly better and still eternally doomed psychic spy operation out there. And I bet they DO have better coffee :)

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feathersmcgraw's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

1.0

I really don't care for Ronson's style. Good lord, summarise. A frightening amount of the audibook is him regurgitating interview transcripts (he said, I said, he said, ad nausuem) in a way that I can only describe as grating. Maybe it was supposed to be comedic, I just didn't find it at all funny. If anything I felt he was being quite glib when talking about torture.

As an investigation, I still don't get it. How would remote viewing or subliminal messaging even begin to actually work? I have no idea, Ronson never bothered to interview any independent experts to ask. Instead, he interviews various military types ranging from the secretive to the delusional. One of the first ones was with Uri Geller of all people 'being activated'. It was downhill from there.

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