Customer Reviews

The Building: A Biography of the Pentagon

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

David Alexander's book on the Pentagon is a must-read for every student of politics and for every politically-enclined and responsible person in the US and abroad who wants to know what stands at the heart of American might and how it functions. Alexander writes beautifully and so clearly that even people like myself, who know so little about the complexities of government, can enjoy the book.


Albert Russo, writer

As one who served a tour of duty in the Pentagon I was sorely disappointed with this book. It isn't about "The Building" at all - in fact the Pentagon is nothing more than a bit player in this work. It's actually a military-political history of the world from the mid-20th Century - and a bad one at that. Events which should have been covered in some depth weren't. Characters which should have played key roles in the narrative are mentioned in passing. Chronologically it's all over the place, jumping back and forth in time with little apparent rhyme or reason. And just when you think you know where the author is going, he makes a left turn and rambles off in some other direction. This book is so bad I actually gave up on it half way through. It just wasn't worth the time.

It really is most unfortunate when the first words of the first chapter of a book are wrong. It is even more unfortunate when the book doesn't get any better. For starters, the author apparently wants to impress readers with his knowledge of Latin; so his heading of the first chapter is supposed to be Vae victis, Woe to the conquered. Only he can't get his Latin spelling right, and he comes up with a silly impossibility. That is only the start. Later, in his discussion of events in the fall of 1938, the author says that FDR won reelection by a wide popular margin. Apparently he didn't notice that there was no presidential election in 1938. In discussing the German attack on France in 1940, he talks about German tanks smashing through the supposedly impregnable French fortifications in the Ardennes collectively called the Maginot Line. Any good historian knows that the main Maginot Line ended south of the Ardennes, and that the Germans did an end run through the Ardennes to avoid having to make a frontal attack on the line. In talking about the Pentagon's local impact in 1940, he refers to the West Virginia suburban spaces it was to occupy. Has the author even visited the DC area? Does he even know where West Virginia is? If these four were the only mistakes, they could be overlooked. But these merely illustrate the kinds of errors that occur page after page after page. Before I had read 50 pages, my confidence in the accuracy of the book was so shaken that I felt I couldn't trust anything the author said without checking the facts myself.

Stylistically, the book rambles a great deal, going off on tangents that seem to represent the author's pet interests rather than the history of the building. (I'm still trying to figure out how the novels of Ayn Rand are relevant to the narrative.) A good editing job would probably have improved the book, though I'm not sure it could have saved it. If it were possible, I would have given this book zero stars.

Looking through the index, how can this book aptly discuss the post-9/11 restoration of the Pentagon without mention of The Phoenix Project, PenRen, Lee Evey or Allyn Kilsheimer?