Let's start the way the author starts, by saying "This is a true story". Is it really? We have no way of knowing that, of course. Jon Ronson is a journalist and this book is meant to be (not only a bestseller and the base of a movie script to be turned into a future blockbuster, but also a) journalistic investigation.
It most certainly speaks about real events and real people. Events like the Waco incident, the mass suicide of Heaven's Gate cult members, the Abu Ghraib tortures and scandal, Guantanamo Bay torture allegations, Project MK-Ultra and so on. Real people like several Generals and other ex-military people, ex-CIA, ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoners, plus celebrities like Uri Geller and Art Bell.
But that's where the verifiable stops and the insanity begins. Jon Ronson, in his 2 years long investigation of the usage of unconventional methods by the US military and the CIA, claims to have slipped quite deep down the rabbit hole. How real is this rabbit hole and how real are the claims of the people he had interviewed, that we can't possibly know for sure any more.
So the books essentially leaves us with a lot of questions, rather than answers. But those questions are worth asking and the trip in itself is mind-boggling, tragic, comic, absurd and... vonnegut-esque.
I'm looking forward to the movie (with George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey), although I half expect to be disappointed (why in the world did they insist of making it into a comedy??)
But that's where the verifiable stops and the insanity begins. Jon Ronson, in his 2 years long investigation of the usage of unconventional methods by the US military and the CIA, claims to have slipped quite deep down the rabbit hole. How real is this rabbit hole and how real are the claims of the people he had interviewed, that we can't possibly know for sure any more.
So the books essentially leaves us with a lot of questions, rather than answers. But those questions are worth asking and the trip in itself is mind-boggling, tragic, comic, absurd and... vonnegut-esque.
I'm looking forward to the movie (with George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey), although I half expect to be disappointed (why in the world did they insist of making it into a comedy??)
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