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1 of 1 members found this review helpful.Great but unsettling book.
“Excellent book. Thoroughly entertaining and equally disturbing. What started out as light hearted story into training psychic soldiers slowly becomes more and more unpleasant as Ronson discovers these little pieces to an overwhelmingly frightening, (for me, anyway) larger picture. It throws up some very alarming red flags and questions about some very dark places our men and women of the military are going.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-14.
It's also great to see all these live interviews with everyone in this book (and for all the reviews calling BS on this book) with Jon Ronson's companion piece documentary that was made with this book for Channel 4 in Britain, 'Crazy Rulers of the World'. Yes, these people actually exist and yes, they really do believe this stuff and yes there is a Jim Channon who came up with the '1st Earth Battalion' for the military. It was not just a "what if" piece that one reviewer claimed it was. Just Youtube Crazy Rulers of the World. It's a 3 part doco titled "The Men Who Stare at Goats", "Funny Torture" and "Psychic Footsoldiers" respectively.” -
5 of 5 members found this review helpful.
Not funny, as it should be
“This book isn't funny.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-12.
Mind you, Ronson knows exactly what he's doing by presenting the book as "hilarious" - it starts out completely absurd, with the high-minded hippy ideals of a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran presented to a beleaguered military under siege. Jim Channon, seeking solace in the emerging human potential movement in California, struck a chord with the top brass, and the repercussions are still felt today.
But instead of being used as a positive force for peace, the military twisted it into a force of evil. Ronson ties it all together: September 11, Heaven's Gate, sticky foam, Abu-Grahib, Waco, Art Bell, Projects STARGATE, MKULTRA, and ARTICHOKE, and yes, Barney. Goat-staring is the least of our worries.
The thread running throughout all these seemingly disconnected blips in history is that they are a new form of psychological warfare that is innocuous, ruthless, and entirely effective. The Men Who Stare at Goats would be just another conspiracy-laden anti-government diatribe if it wasn't for the fact that Ronson always takes the next step as an investigative reporter. He finds people to back up the wild claims, interviews them, and often challenges their wild theories.
The sad thing is, very few of these shadowy contacts hide their past. Almost unilaterally, Ronson calls them all out by name and they step forward, sharing a story that sheds a disconcerting light on America's human rights record. Where is the vigorous conversation, the protests, the discord over these revelations? The facts are right here before us - even photographic evidence -- but we laugh about Barney being used to torture prisoners and we shake our heads at the poor, misguided psychics. But outrage? There's no outrage. We save our vitriol for partisan debates in our own government.
Eric Olson, son of Frank Olson, a military scientist who died under mysterious circumstances while working on MKULTRA, sums it up best:
"The old story is so much fun, why would anyone want to replace it with a story that's not fun. You see...this is no longer a happy, feel-good story...People have been brainwashed by fiction...so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, 'We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.' Actually, we know nothing of this. There's no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don't know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they're not cynical at all."
Have you heard? There's a movie based on this book coming out starring George Clooney.
It's a comedy.” -
1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
Entertaining, if unfocused
“After the Vietnam War, as this story goes, the U.S. military was re-examining its tactics. Morale was low, and they badly needed to develop some new strategies and weapons to regain superiority. It was in this context that individuals within the intelligence community successfully pushed for the creation of a super-secret military unit, one that would experiment with honing and weaponizing supernatural and paranormal powers--the ability to walk through walls, turn oneself invisible, read minds and, as the title suggest, kill goats just by staring at them.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-12-28.
Ronson states in the first sentence of the book, "This is a true story." It's a much-needed statement, because the book so quickly delves into unbelievable weirdness that it's easy to forget that this is a journalistic endeavor and not a total farce. And in the end, it's more a story of Ronson trying to get to the bottom of this concept of "soldier monks" (as one person calls the paranormal soldiers) than it is a concrete story about the soldiers themselves. Ronson wanders from source to source, some well-informed and some undoubtedly whack-jobs, and story to story. He touches on everything from an elite unit of psychic warriors testing their powers on livestock in a small building at Fort Bragg, to the Heaven's Gate cult, to an alleged CIA murder, to modern psychological torture techniques used in Iraq and Guantanamo.
It's these last turns that give the book some weight. Because Ronson follows the story wherever the questions lead him, you might find yourself on one page laughing at a man who claims to be able to stop a hamster's heart with his mind, and then a few pages later contemplating the very definition of torture. Not as cohesive as Ronson's THEM: ADVENTURES WITH EXTREMISTS, and ultimately probably not as successful, but overall a wild and entertaining ride that surprisingly leads to some very topical issues.
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0 of 1 members found this review helpful.
Very interesting read, but is it true?
“I read this book, and I couldn't put it down. It is that interesting! I hope the movie is as good as the book, especially that it was film in my Municipality of Bayamon, Puerto Rico.
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-11-22.
Anyways, read the book and then go and see the movie!” -
MUST read!
“ I feel this book is written in a very entertaining style, yet, its truths are something we all should be made aware of. Jon Ronson doesn't inflict his opinions on us. I feel he just tells the story and the truths are laid out by the people he interviews who actually lived it. A definite must read. I am going to buy his other book "Them" on Friday!”
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-10-07.
