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@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.),

@loppear, what made you stop? Why so eager to start all over? (I've also had the first two in the series gathering dust on my shelf; the comparisons to Wolfe both encouraged me to buy them, but also intimidate me from starting them.)

Re-reading because that's what I do

Reading it along with a Slack book club; hope to make it through this time.

An "overlay" is "a horse whose odds are greater than its potential to win," which is to say, a pretty good bet. (Looking up horse racing and gambling terms was quite necessary.) Guess betting on humanity's self-destructive irrationality is pretty safe too.

The text read as if it were an early draft, with many phrases and images repeated, some flabby bits; it feels near improvised, and the frame of having an alien author writing this—for his superiors? His peers in the Agency?—half excuses this. (Further, I think the Kindle edition I read was scanned and not corrected closely: there were many typos, missing punctuation, etc.)

Read it because I heard of it on SF Ultra with Sean McTiernan and Matt (from Bookpilled), for what that's worth.