This more recent book explores the investigation of the cause of Legionnaires' disease by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta immediately following the Legionnaires' disease outbreak at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia in 1976.

It gives a blow by blow decription of the people involved and, more importantly, the political factors that led to the CDC looking for a virus or bacterium as the cause, rather than any other likely factor such as food contamination or any other toxic substance.
The main conclusion I drew from the book, not necessarily shared by the author, came from the last few pages where the scientists finally found some signs of a microorganism which they named legionella. It was not found in large enough amounts to cause disease, nor was it found in the relevant tissues of all the victims who died (such as the saliva or mucus). This shows that it could not have been the main factor in the deaths of the Legionnaires. Since that time legionella has wrongly been singled out as the only cause of the disease. It thus adds to the long string of false assumptions made by the medical profession that lead to the situation where only 15% of medical interventions are based on solid evidence. The HIV as the cause of AIDS is a similarly wrongly accused innocent victim as described in Peter Duesberg's excellent book "Inventing the AIDS Virus"

The simplicity with which the text is written belies the tragedy of these women who gave up their lives for a religious belief which some might argue only serves to degrade their gender.

Brain Surgery is a very scary situation and Thomas makes it easier to handle by providing detail interspersed with personality, plot, and history.

Highly recommended if your in the unfortuneate position of needing it.

I enjoyed the stories about Brooke and Jeff, how they met, a glimpse of the shy Jeff as he started his relationship with Brooke and Brooke's influence on Jeff's spiritual growth.

Gary Thomas covers the significant Winston Cup Races well. He describes the key points of each race in a way that even a racing novice could understand. The book includes a glossary of racing terminolody for the novice.

Included are interesting facts about other race car drivers and their interactions with Jeff, such as Dale Earnhardt teaching Jeff how to draft at Daytona.

Overall, this book was a fun and interesting read and you don't have to be a race fan to enjoy it.

I only wish that there would have been more pictures.

A society which employs Certified Public Accountants presupposes that people will be able to keep track of certain things, certainly money, for sure, and who people are, though this book finds a certain glory in how easy it is to fool official guardians of the identity assumptions with simple tricks. Obviously, this works best at places like Numec, a company specializing in reprocessing nuclear waste, in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Anybody ought to be able to figure out how likely it is that the following events, prior to December 1982, but reported as background information, might have actually occurred:

His two companions were described on their cards as scientists from `The Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel'.
There was no such department.
The men were LAKAM security officers whose task would be to see the best way of stealing fissionable waste from Numec. All three spent four days in Apollo, passing many hours touring the Numec plant, sitting for more hours in Shapiro's office. What they spoke about would remain a secret. On the fifth day Eitan and his companions left Apollo as unobstrusively as they had arrived.
A month later the first of nine shipments of containers of nuclear waste left Numec. Each container would bear the words: `Property of the State of Israel: Ministry of Agriculture'. The containers would carry a stencil stating they had full diplomatic clearance and so were exempt from customs checks before they were stowed on board El Al cargo freighters to Tel Aviv.
The containers were destined for Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. (pp. 55-56)

One way to be a Mogul, buying companies close to bankruptcy and investing enough to turn them into successes, is described in this book as just the starting point for how "Robert Maxwell was the Barnum and Bailey of the financial world, the great stock market ringmaster able to introduce with consummate speed and a crack of his whip some new and even more startling financial act. But increasingly his high-wire actions had become more dangerous - and long ago he had abandoned any idea of a safety net." (p. 34). Maxwell's arrangements with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet KGB, who had been involved in the August plot to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office, made certain bankers insecure enough to want Maxwell to pay some of their loans. Maxwell thought 400 million pounds might be enough "to stave off his more pressing creditors. He asked Mossad to use its influence with Israel's banker's to arrange a loan. He was told to try to do what his fellow tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, had done when he had faced a similar situation. Murdoch had confessed his plight to his bankers and then renegotiated his debts, which were almost twice what Maxwell owed." (pp. 13-14). Actually, Maxwell must have owed far more than he told the Mossad. A Daily Mirror headline in the photographs section, after the "Maxwell Dies at Sea" picture, reported, "Maxwell: 536m pounds is missing from his firms/ The increasingly desperate actions of a desperate man."

Assuming that much, the rest of the book is written around questions raised by Efraim.

`If the truth about Robert Maxwell surfaces and he is destroyed in the process, who else will be compromised? How great will the damage be to Israel?' (p. 15).

Americans might be interested in this book for judging the current chances for success of American policies that seem to parallel the desperation of Robert Maxwell, but might cause Bill Casey even greater pain, if he were still in charge.

This book is anything but boring--calling this book boring strikes me as a desperate subterfuge by someone who want to keep its explosive contents from fuller circulation. This book is *fascinating* and explosive, not least because of the very well documented coverage it provides of how Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, used Robert Maxwell to penetrate not just the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, the military, and the national laboratories, but many foreign governments including the Chinese, Canadians, Australians, and many others, with substantial penetration of their intelligence service databases, all through his sale of a software called PROMIS that had a back door enabling the Mossad to access everything it touched (in simplistic terms).

Also shocking, at least to me, was the extensive detail in this book about how the Israeli intelligence service is able to mobilize Jews everywhere as "sayanim," volunteer helpers who carry out operational (that is to say, clandestine) support tasks to include spying on their government and business employers, stealing documents, operating safehouses, making pretext calls, and so on. I am a simple person: if you are a Jew and a US citizen, and you do this for the Israeli intelligence service, then you are a traitor, plain and simple. This practice is evidently world-wide, but especially strong in the US and the UK.

The book draws heavily on just a couple of former Israeli intelligence specialists to address Israeli use of assassination as a normal technique (and implicitly raises the possibility that it was used against Senator John Tower, who died in small airplane crash and was the primary "agent" for Maxwell and Israel in getting PROMIS installed for millions of dollars in fees all over the US Government).

Finally, the book has a great deal of detail about the interplay between governments, crime families, Goldman Sachs and other major investors, and independent operators like Robert Maxwell who play fast and loose with their employee pension funds.

This book is not boring. Far from it. It is shocking, and if it is only half-right and half-accurate, that is more than enough to warrant its being read by every American, whatever their faith.

This book reminds me a lot of "The Puzzle Palace" a "secret history" about NSA. Compared to the CIA or MI6, both NSA and MOSSAD have virtually nothing of substance in the way of reference books. Most of the facts are based upon specualtion, innuendo and heresay. The authors in both books is probably gathering TONS of information from every source. But, since he can't publish all of it, he must filter it to create a story. But how? He is not an agent. He has never worked in the intelligence field and does not really have the background to choose what is fact or fiction--in the intell world it si sometimes blurred. So the auther instead falls back on what he DOES know. Which is writing stories.

This book IS an incredably good story. As good as any Tom Clancy novel, and it even jumps around (Clancy-style) a lot just as it is getting intriguing. But, since this book is intended as a resource of non-fiction, what does the author give the reader to gain credibility? Answer: A 5 page "Note on Sources" which only elaborates on a few people he interviewed, but never cross-referencing with the stories within the chapters. There is an index, but so what? In some places Mr. Thomas also insinuates that he attended several of the events as a reporter, but never says who he talked to, about what subject. No doubt he had is tape-recorder running, but one never knows whether something was on or off the record. I would also think that since he makes reference to some books and newspapers, that he would document those, but alas!

As I was reading this book, I could almost hear Geraldo Rivera in my head narrating it. (note to publisher: get Geraldo to narrate the audio book. You'll sell millions.) Both the author and Geraldo share an emphasis of the sensational and exaggeration. They never worry about sources, because they are journalists by habit and not historians. They have no need to be accountable, just in making sure they get credit for the story. Unfortunately, since this book is so compelling (which is why I at least gave it 3 stars), but lacks so much in the way of documentation, it could have been THE subject matter on Israeli intelligence. Instead it will be a popular read for a short time and wind up in the bargain bin in a few months.

The tales Thomas tells are often very critical of the Mossad, yet running through the book is the implication that the Mossad is the only competant intelligence organization on the planet, and that all other intelligence organizations are staffed with bumbling fools.

The book seesm to give the impression is that Thomas' principle source of information is one or more retired or discharged Mossad officers who have both a pride in the organization as well as an axe or two to grind, but the reader begins to doubt that at least halfway through the book. Many of the stories just don't add up. Some, like the story of Gerald Bull, are absolutely at odds with versions told by well-established sources and thoroughly documented. The Bull story in particular reads like a sloppy farbication by someone who hasn't done a lot of research.

Most of it is completely unverifiable, and a great deal of it strikes me as completely fabricated. And maybe, just maybe, the book is a piece of disinformation itself, designed to mislead and confuse. Who knows? File it on your bookshelves somewhere midway between Le Carre and Fleming.