{"id":835,"date":"2015-01-09T07:22:55","date_gmt":"2015-01-09T15:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=835"},"modified":"2015-01-30T10:48:47","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T18:48:47","slug":"review-the-men-who-stare-at-goats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/09\/review-the-men-who-stare-at-goats\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\n The Men Who Stare at Goats<\/a> by Jon Ronson<\/a>
\n My rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

I was part way through The Men Who Stare at Goats<\/i> and I was thinking: \u201cThis is early Ronson. He gets better in his later books.\u201d I just thought this early Ronson was a little bit silly. Not irreverent exactly, but… I don\u2019t know. Just not taking things very seriously. Which is not to say that later Ronson is overly somber or serious or even academic. <\/p>\n

But I was wrong. This early Ronson is every bit as good as later Ronson. I learned quite a bit from The Psychopath Test<\/i> and Lost at Sea<\/i>, and I learned maybe even more from Men<\/i>. And even though the book is now 10 years old, it\u2019s still very relevant, given new talk in the media about the CIA and torture.<\/p>\n

Whoa, you say, torture?<\/i> I saw the movie, what\u2019s this about torture?<\/i> Yeah, you see: like I said, I was wrong. Ronson\u2019s not silly or something like irreverent\u2014he was just setting me up. As I read more, and as I finished the book, it just got darker and darker. There\u2019s the goofiness of conspiracy theories, there\u2019s the smug satisfaction in rejecting them, and then there\u2019s that terrible, dark place, the root of truth from which these theories are born. That\u2019s where Ronson goes. Torture, ritual mass suicide, government-sanctioned murder. <\/p>\n

What a like about Ronson, along with his engaging writing style and gung-ho approach (as opposed to \u2018gonzo,\u2019 if you\u2019ll forgive me) is how he inverts cognitive dissonance. Human beings have a way to dismiss the terrible things that make up every day existence, and Ronson gets in there and lays it all out\u2014accept it as terrible or call him a liar. There\u2019s no dismissing the truth.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t say that \u201cfans of Ronson will enjoy The Men Who Stare at Goats<\/i>\u201d only because I\u2019m pretty sure that fans of Ronson have already read it. I will say that newcomers to Ronson should read it. And those who don\u2019t like Ronson, or haven\u2019t read Ronson? What is wrong with you people?<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was part way through The Men Who Stare at Goats and I was thinking: \u201cThis is early Ronson. He gets better in his later books.\u201d I just thought this early Ronson was a little bit silly. Not irreverent exactly, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-dt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":836,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions\/836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}