@lucasrizoli why is it a 3*? The title sounds like a banger. Wanted to add it to to-read, but saw your low rating.

@jonn, if you're interested, go for it.

The confusion may be just a matter of how we understand the rating scale? I wouldn't consider a 3/5 a low rating (2, okay; 1, definitely). I appreciated the book, learned a lot, feel like it helped me with my own understanding of history, etc. If I had to quibble with it, I didn't like the final chapter (in which the author—to me, quite inconsistently with the history presented previous to it—proposes that Gottlieb did all these horrible things because of a genuine fear and misapprehension of the threat to, uh, America posed by the USSR, Communism, etc.),

@lucasrizoli ah, I see! For me, the threshold to suggest some book is 3.5. 4 is a very solid book that is worth re-reading, 4.5 is something outstanding, 5 is a masterpiece. I also don't think that a 3 is a low rating, but it does make a book "a filler".

Certainly, logical an inconsistency is one of the reasons for which I would award a non-fiction book a 3.

Thank you so much for taking your time to explain the rating!