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A review by huerca_armada
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill
challenging
dark
slow-paced
3.25
Against a backdrop of the rich cultural history of the 1960s, O'Neill paints a beautiful picture of the seedy elements that underlie this crystalline structure. Drug dealers, retired air force colonels and generals, CIA spies and FBI informants, celebrity musicians and movie stars, all moving in the same circles as that of the Manson Family lend a strange fabric to the story that O'Neill presents to us. Gradually, by peeling back these layers, O'Neill draws you into the many threads that tie these things together, until you find yourself nodding along with the evidence presented to you. What seems on the surface to be vaguely circumspect gradually becomes more and more plausible as these layers are unveiled.
While overall, I am able to thoroughly enjoy the inconsistencies that O'Neill is able to uncover within the official Manson investigative story, there is frustratingly no large through line that we can draw from any of these disparate pieces. That's the nature of a book that attempts to unmask the evidence that is arrayed in a jumbled jigsaw of names, dates, places, and timelines that only some of those involved can corroborate whilst others refuse or are incapable of refuting at all. And because of that, we cannot ever know if the conclusions that we may attempt to draw from the evidence presented will ever be true. All we can do is just draw conclusions and fall further down the demented rabbit hole.
While overall, I am able to thoroughly enjoy the inconsistencies that O'Neill is able to uncover within the official Manson investigative story, there is frustratingly no large through line that we can draw from any of these disparate pieces. That's the nature of a book that attempts to unmask the evidence that is arrayed in a jumbled jigsaw of names, dates, places, and timelines that only some of those involved can corroborate whilst others refuse or are incapable of refuting at all. And because of that, we cannot ever know if the conclusions that we may attempt to draw from the evidence presented will ever be true. All we can do is just draw conclusions and fall further down the demented rabbit hole.