Sunday, December 27, 2015

Spy the Lie by Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, Susan Carnicero


Rating: WORTHY!

This is a book written by a twenty-five year veteran of the CIA, and ex-employee of both the CIA and the NSA, and a CIA security officer. I picked it up because it looked interesting and recently I've been watching the TV show Lie to Me which I completely adore. That show, which gets a mention here, actually employs some of the techniques discussed in this book, although it understandably over-dramatizes them (sometimes to a melodramatic level) for the sake of making entertaining TV.

This book is a little slow, and doesn't offer much (the audio version to which I listened was only four CDs), but what it does offer, when it offers it, is interesting and useful knowledge. It mentions real cases in which the authors have been involved, and some in which they were not, including, for example, the Simpson (OJ, not Homer) trial.

This book never was intended as an audio book, so it makes no sense to it referring to figures and diagrams, which are clearly print version only. Those issues aside, I enjoyed listening and learned some interesting stuff - stuff that maybe I can use in some future novel? Who knows?! It's read by Fred Berman whose voice was slightly irritating but not obnoxious. I recommend this if you're into the background to spying and lying.