4.0

The journey of this man - what made him unique and special and precious was beautifully rendered. He was the real deal. Pat Tillman clearly deserved more than what happened to him - killed in his very first firefight by his own comrades. But the overriding sense of this book is that the entire resulting coverup - not just of what happened to Pat Tillman, but the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Jessica Lynch fantasy, the Iraq invasion itself - was manufactured by the Bush regime to fulfill some mysterious machoistic desire. It was hard to read this, especially when my reading time is right before I go to sleep. I'd be so frustrated and keyed up that I found it hard to go to sleep afterwards.

Jon Krakauer's political leanings weren't very disguised, but he did his usual fantastic job of thoroughly researching his subject, factually fine-tuning the details, and spelling it out in simple but gripping language.