Michael Morell has had a fascinating career, from being with George W. Bush on 9/11 to sitting in CIA's situation room on the night Bin Ladin was killed. He recounts some of that career here and gives the reader a glance at the scope and scale of the US's efforts to combat extremism around the world.

I've docked one star due to the flow of the text: it's structured mostly as a series of loosely related anecdotes and doesn't necessarily weave those anecdotes together very well. Morell talks about the human moments at CIA - which are usually pretty entertaining - and then often abruptly jumps back to policy discussions.

Morell has sat in on some of the biggest headline-generating events in US history, and not all of them were positive headlines. He comes across as honest in the book and freely admits his missteps and occasional naivete. His discussion of the behavior of many policymakers in Congress is maddening and echoed by other high-level intelligence officials who interacted directly with policymakers.

Easy to recommend for students of the IC.