Why Secret Intelligence Fails Book

If the last history I read (The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream) was written at the level of the USA Today, this book is written at the level of the Weekly World News. This book is a series of broad value assertions in the most purple of prose without attribution or logical argument, apparently under the impression that no argument is necessary if the assertion is bold or biased enough.

If this were a first term paper by a 10th grade high school student, the English teach would have wasted a red pen circling sentences and writing "Is this common knowledge? Needs to be foot noted."

But this not a first term paper by a 10th grade high school student, it is an "academic" history text published by Yale University Press.

I wonder if this is what passes for scholarship in the Ivy League these days.