BOOK REVIEW: MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

The alternate title to this post could be “XIPHOS TAKES ONE FOR THE TEAM”. This is a badly written book which is surprising since author Jon Ronson’s previous work, Them: Adventures with Extremist, was a well written and much better book.

I ‘m not going to spend a lot of time with this review because it doesn’t merit much attention. I’ll just hit the highlights or more accurately the low-lights in this book. In the first thirty pages Ronson makes such egregious errors that I have to conclude that:

1.) Ronson did no research.

2.) He only wanted to grind his ax.

3.) This was a quickie book to follow up on the success his first book.

4.) Ronson is, to use the wonderful English term, “taking the piss” on us all.

Anybody that seriously uses “psychic” Uri Geller and his dumb spoon bending ass as a source is obviously just here to cash a check. Also Ronson either doesn’t understand how Special Forces Medic training works or more than likely doesn’t care. I have news for him, using goats for medic training is not some big secret. It has been known for years and I’m 99% sure that most of the training for SF medics doesn’t even occur on Ft. Bragg. Bragg is where the training battalion for medics is headquartered. It’s in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Special Warfare School and Center.

Also, from page to page, the tone of the book shifts radically, the men who “stare at goats/kill them” don’t even exist. There are so many different people alleged to have done it, it smacks of BS. Nobody can say for sure who did it. Was it the civilian Martial Arts expert? Was it the former Green Beret/Mercenary that died under mysterious conditions? (He was run over by a jeep trying to prove he could survive getting run over by a jeep. What a rube.) And the goat killing is really only about 10 pages out of the entire book

Lastly, most of the book is spent confusing two different dopey “psychic” warfare units that existed and did absolutely nothing in reality. The first was the “Stargate” program of remote viewers and the First Earth Battalion of “warrior monks” or as the movie trailer calls them Jedi Warriors.

In closing, skip this book. It’s not even mildly entertaining. Go read Ronson’s other book Them. That book is actually well written, researched and a good read. I know this is a very quick review so if anybody has any questions concerning the book, I will be happy to answer them in the talk back.

Mahalo,

Xiphos.