Reviews for Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

The average rating for Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-21 00:00:00 Andrej Blejec The most entertaining one-star book you may ever read. If I'm rating based on the sheer page-turner appeal of the first half of the book, I give it two or three stars. Gideon's Spies is chalk full of harrowing tales of treachery, boldness, and bravery, written in the voice of a murder mystery. The trouble is Thomas's shoddy writing, or, to be fair to Thomas, perhaps it's the publishing house's shoddy editing. It's hard to take very seriously a book that claims the Lockerbie bombings took place in 1998. Thomas also doesn't do himself any favors in the credibility department by kicking the book off with a lengthy 30 page examination of the Princess Diana conspiracy theories. Look, maybe Mossad was involved -- I don't know. But if you're trying to establish credibility, at least bury the stuff about Di somewhere in the middle once you've convinced the reader that you're to be taken seriously. Further, there's no coherent narrative to this book. Thomas jumps all over the place chronologically. We start in 1997, then it's the 1920s through the 1960s, then it's the nineties again, then back to the 1980s. It was impossible to pick up a thread. All that was going on was that Thomas was threading together one cool story after another. And, again, I give the guy props for telling some really cool stories. That's why this book has one star instead of zero. But things completely fall apart after about 350 pages. At that point, the first edition clearly ends, and the final 300 pages is tacked on. Literally tacked on. Thomas did additional research -- kudos for that -- but made seemingly no effort to integrate the updated material with the earlier stuff. He defines terms we already learned. He rehashes stories -- dude, we already heard that story 200 pages ago! He mixes up dates. He does this weird thing when he quotes people where he writes "(insert quote here)," said So-and-So (to the author). I have just never seen that before in a serious, real book, and it came across very sophomoric. I think Thomas could have done himself a lot of favors, and given his obviously very thorough research a real air of authority and reality if he had integrated the last half of the book into the first half, checked his dates, written a bit less breezily, and left certain stories completely out. As is, this is only passable fiction. Which is a shame, because, if true, this book is groundbreaking. The trouble is we can't take anything we read here seriously, even if we should.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-11-30 00:00:00 Gregory Lamphear This is an interesting book to review. While I learned quite a bit from this book, I take issue with the fill-in-the-gap nature that the author of this book takes when he doesn't have evidence to present with the assertions that he makes. There is no doubt that the author harbors an anti-Israeli bias and this tone is evident throughout the book. I am willing to read books and objectively consider the evidence at hand regardless of my preconceived beliefs. In first reading this book, I expected the book to be one in which facts and evidence was presented of past actions of the Mossad. There is no doubt that the Mossad has been responsible for assassinations and other forms of sabotage so simply presenting the evidence and the facts is what I expected this book would be of. Throughout the book, the author speculates and inserts his own beliefs and conspiracy theories rather than simply presenting the evidence at hand. He does this often by "raising questions" and making speculations. Not to mention that footnotes of his claims are not provided. Again, there is no doubt that there is truth to many of the stories that the author shares. Still, some of the claims are pure conspiracy theories. For example, he speculates that the Mossad or the CIA had a hand in the Pan-AM terrorist attack. He also likes to rely on anonymous sources and his own insinuations and beliefs based on not evidence. This is what makes many of the claims of the author questionable. I am not Israeli nor Jewish. I am Iranian-American atheist. I simply wanted to learn of the facts with evidence rather than the tangents that the author goes off in many directions. The editing was also poorly done with many grammar mistakes. This book was an interesting read indeed. It simply is one in which the conclusion of the cases he presents were often time muddied by his tangents that were more often than not his own speculations devoid of evidence.