The Secrets of the FBI

For my nonfiction book, I read The Secrets of the FBI by Ronald Kessler. When I started the book I was expecting to enjoy it because…who doesn’t like secrets? The book was interesting and very well written. There was huge variety of secrets included. Each was explained thoroughly and in a way that can leave almost anyone in surprise.

Some examples of secrets explained were really interesting to me. The book talks about what really happned in the uncovering of agent Rober Hanssn, who was a spy. It's not what was portrayed in the movie, Breach. There are also tricks and ways the FBI use to plant bugs into the homes and offices of some of the most dangerous and intelligen Mafia figures, spies, and terrorists. A more recent secret includes the mismatching of Osama bin Laden's fingerprints after his death.

One thing I especially liked about the book was that it wasn't just a random gathering of facts and secrets of the FBI. Kessler was able to start wiht fun, amusing, and interesting stories about the FBI planting bugs in homes and offices and end with a fact-filled story about the death of Osama bin Laden. Every chapter was connected by certain ideas to almost make it a little story of how the FBI has advanced. The book was pretty much in order of time. It was clear how certain directors of the FBI helped and/or hurt the FBI. Each chapter keeps the reader understanding how the FBI has changed how it works over the years. Even that was especially interesting to read.

Ronald Kessler impressed me in his way that he kept the pages turning. His writing style was very easy to follow, and his word choice had enough spice to keep from boring me. I can honestly say that my response to the book is that nothing needs to be changed. I enjoyed it very much.

Google!!

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"...the title of Nicholas Carr's article about the internet's affects to our brains seemed pretty self-explanatory of what the paper was going to be about. He went on for seven pages to talk about how the internet is affecting how we read, think, learn, work, etc. He was able to go back through time to basically every advancement in writing and reading. All of them showed similarities in the ways that they changed the human's way of thinking. The examples were like...evidence to the point Carr was trying to make. His basic idea was that the internet and it's search engines have made reading completely different and more difficult. Now we have changed to skimming and hopping around. I personally think he has a good point...but at the same time, I like the easy and quick access to information I need.

There were a couple things that bothered me about the way that he wrote the piece. There were times when I didn't understand why he included what he did. Maybe I was just having a hard time finding a reason to actually understand the first paragraph, but to me it didn't have a point. "Dave, stop, will you? Will you stop, Dave?..." I thought it was a terrible introduction.

I guess that might be kind of picky to criticize for the paper, because it was a good overall paper. There were a lot of things that I liked and a lot of things that I agreed with. I thought that Carr did a great job of putting out an example from years ago and then nicely connecting it to how the internet has changed things as well. One example would be the "like clock work" and "like computers" part in the paper. These allowed me to have a lot of great realizations as I read the piece.

I also thought he did a great job of including important and useful supporting details for the points he was making. I agreed with pretty much everything that he said. The article was a lot better, in my opinion, than the skunk one because it actually made sense to me and was a lot easier to read.