The Men Who Stare at Goats,   ISBN:9781439181775

Customer Rating: 

Book follows an old fashioned line of taking some truth and building your own conspiracy around it. I mean the poster girl from Abu Graib is one ofn his authorities. ("They made me do it")

Customer Rating: 

This book was better than expected! Ronson writes about a serious subject in a humorous tone. The author does a wonderful job illustrating each characters humorous quirks, while knowing when to take a more serious tone. The book is funny and a bit scary at the same time, which isn't as easy task for a writer. I was impressed to say the least, and quickly ordered Ronson's previous title "Them: Adventures With Extremists", and am anxiously awaiting it's arrival.

Customer Rating: 

It's highly probable that Ronson intentionally drafted a rather short and breezy overview of a rather serious and fascinating subject. If you've ever read Ken Silverstein's 'Radioactive Boy Scout' or Peter Levenda's 'Unholy Alliance' (about Nazi occultism), then you'll have some idea of what he was trying to accomplish. Probably explains why this has become a feature film, where others have not. In this particular case, however, I am convinced that what began as a sort of cynical jab at crazy government types actually snowballed and turned colors on the author. As a result, it's a rather strange and unstable creation that is neither very funny nor nearly informative enough, but it is perhaps sufficient introduction to fuller courses you may gleefully pursue elsewhere. My personal recommendations would have to be Targ's 'Limitless Mind,' Buchanan's 'Seventh Sense,' and particularly McMoneagle's 'Remote Viewing Secrets.' Those will keep you plenty busy with lots of colorful history, and even practical exercises.

Customer Rating: 

"The Men Who Stare At Goats" by Jon Ronson is a hilarious but rather frightening account of "what happens when a small group of men - highly placed within the United States military, the government, and the intelligence services - begin believing in very strange things." The title comes from a program at Fort Bragg where, for a time, members of Special Forces tried to stare goats to death. Equally remarkable and crazy is the CIA's experimental clairvoyance program (it turns out thinking really hard about where Soviets subs are doesn't work), a general who tried to walk through walls and the use of the song "I love you" from Barney the Dinosaur as a torture device. Unsurprisingly, the military is not immune to human folly: there are those who believe fervently in woo and the paranormal. That these people wield tremendous coercive power just makes it all the more frightening.

The style is informal and journalistic, the content gripping and the book a pleasure to read. While there are no hard-core intellectual analyses, Ronson knows it's all bollocks - he lets the silliness speaks for itself. Overall, a fun book on a serious topic that will keep you interested throughout.
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Customer Rating: 

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.
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.