Buy new:

$9.98

List Price: $16.00

Save: $6.02 (38%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime & FREE Returns

FREE delivery Thursday, March 24 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Only 5 left in stock - order soon.

As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app. Want to listen? Try Audible.

[{"displayPrice":"$9.98","priceAmount":9.98,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"9","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"98","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"uRz1ZkKZtFJc9rCtfPNbWXy5rVY0b0cgs0TEU9srBNmm3v8L%2BTCmIyn27hKbEA0rRx0SnA3oLoLUgBRklrlMYp3B4pzCxwa5IIc4LgCZQahdpV3CKmagflu59Ce6Yr8f%2FousO%2FQT6UfF0unK3ZplazGjdJ%2Fx76IZg%2F6iWbfHB0kvFfSbjTY39FW4%2FMDE5NdR","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"}]

$$9.98 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon

Sold by

STONEPRODUCTS LLC

Details

Ships from

Amazon

Sold by

STONEPRODUCTS LLC

Return policy: Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$5.99
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: Book_Outpost

Added

Not added

$9.99
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Sold by: Buy The Deals

Added

Not added

$14.89
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Sold by: Crawdaddy Inc

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Kathleen J. McInnis

The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon Paperback – September 25, 2018

by Kathleen J. McInnis (Author)

89 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$9.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Paperback

"Please retry"

$9.98

$5.99

$3.41

Audio CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$22.15

$19.65

$17.95

Enhance your purchase

Featured in The NY Times magazine!

Featured in “Best of 2018” by Foreign Policy magazine!

The Devil Wears Prada meets Catch-22; a novel about a young woman’s journey into the heart of Washington’s war machine.

Dr. Heather Reilly has been an anti-war activist since her brother died fighting the Taliban. But her crushing student loans drive her to take a job working on a peace plan for Afghanistan, in the last place on Earth she ever thought she'd be employed: the Pentagon. On her first day, however, her position is eliminated and she’s shuffled to a war-fighting office focused on combating Russian aggression. Unfortunately, she knows little about Russia and has deep moral reservations about war. Making matters worse, she’s also working for Ariane Fletcher—a woman so terrifying, she eats generals for breakfast. As Heather learns to navigate the Pentagon’s insane bureaucracy and petty power struggles, she finds that her successes come at the expense of her personal life... and that small mistakes can have major consequences in the Department of Defense.

From Washington D.C.'s corridors of power to the dusty streets of Kabul, Kathleen McInnis spins a smart, hilarious, and heartwarming tale that shines a light on the often frustrating but sometimes rewarding experience of a career in the Pentagon. Packed with insider knowledge about one of the least-known—yet most-powerful—organizations in U.S. national security, McInnis' debut novel establishes her as a major new literary voice with a point of view we've never seen before.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Post Hill Press
Publication date

September 25, 2018
Dimensions

5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

1682616517
ISBN-13

978-1682616512
See all details

Frequently bought together

Maj. Gen. Perry M. Smith
53
Paperback
39 offers from $18.25
Steve Vogel
80
Paperback
39 offers from $3.00

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Heart of War is lovingly relatable to women everywhere working to make a difference in the larger world, even as they wonder how their own lives will sort out." -- Tara Copp, Pentagon Bureau Chief, Military Times & Author, "The Warbird"

"The Heart of War really nails it. Life in the Pentagon is about more than what you read in the newspaper and author Kathleen McInnis takes you on an unforgettable trip into this most unique of worlds." -- Jim Townsend, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European & NATO Policy

"Part office drama, part foible-filled romp through the US's military bureaucracy... Reilly and her colleagues can be counted on throughout the story to be clueless and brilliant by turns, keeping the plot fun through its many twists. Emotional moments tug on the heartstrings, and the romantic subplot concludes in a very satisfying way. Kathleen McInnis's The Heart of War is an amusing contemporary romance." -- Foreword Reviews

"The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon is being compared to The Devil Wears Prada, and for good reason. It is truly a fish out of water story, complete with a demanding female boss and a woman who learns to navigate her new world. This book could have only been written by an insider, which Kathleen McInnis is. Reading about the politics and the way this world works was fascinating, and the author writes it perfectly. I felt like I was running around the Pentagon with her." -- Really Into This

About the Author

Kathleen J. McInnis has worked in the Pentagon, the UK Parliament, and in think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic. Having earned her PhD in War Studies, she currently analyzes international security and defense issues for the United States Congress.

Start reading The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Post Hill Press (September 25, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1682616517
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1682616512
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,047,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,115 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #18,891 in Military Romance (Books)
- #33,637 in Contemporary Women Fiction

Customer Reviews:
89 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Kathleen J. McInnis

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Kathleen J. McInnis has worked in the Pentagon, the UK Parliament, and in think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic. Having earned her PhD in War Studies, she currently analyzes international security and defense issues for the United States Congress. Born in Annapolis, Maryland, Kathleen is a self-professed “base brat” who spent a lot of her formative years on US bases overseas. After jumping back and forth across the pond, she finally settled right back where it all began – in Annapolis. For more information about Kathleen, visit her website at www.kjmcinnis.com.

Customer reviews

5 star		76%
4 star		8%
3 star		9%
2 star		4%
1 star		3%

How are ratings calculated?

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Any Mouse

A loving, insider sneak peek, without all tawdry gossip or ego stroking

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

The Heart of War is fiction, but only just barely and provides a reader with a sense of how the machinery of government really works (when it works at all). The book is peppered with more than a few “I remember that!” anecdotes (carefully edited to protect the innocent). The book has to, by necessity, take a few artistic liberties, but I can assure you all the bars are real even if the conversations aren’t (always) 100% accurate.

More importantly, Heart of War gives a rare glimpse inside the beltway that isn’t written to make this or that person look particularly good or especially bad. It really does capture the narrative arc of so many bright young hopefuls who have come to Washington hoping to make the world a better place, getting discouraged by the reality of government, and finding a way to help out anyways.

Highly recommended!

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Deryl McCarty

Great writing and exquisite humor

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

I read the whole book yesterday after seeing a War on the Rocks mention. For the first two thirds of the book I laughed aloud with the self deprecating humor and the comedic characters and situations with which the author finds herself engrossed. And as an Air Force vet I could identify the story line within about 99% accuracy, only the names and places were changed to protect the innocent (and guilty). But I did get defensive when things got combat serious and some of the antagonists did not. Probably that was the author's intent, to highlight how things can get out of hand as a result of internal politics, but my experience is that cooler heads always emerge when the potential for lead poisoning rears it ugly head. The author did a great job at writing. And except for the Pentagonese, it was thankfully written in plain, ordinary, spoken English. Fortunately I can understand most of both languages. As an aside, it was Ike whose experiences in WWII added State and/or PhD academics to the Pentagon and deployed combat staffs because there is otherwise no context to targeting and planning, therefore no perceived outcome in either the bad guy or American citizen's mind. Easy afternoon read, though a jumbled and emotional thought provoker for going to sleep.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Sam Lichtenstein

Depressing

Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2019

Verified Purchase

This is not an especially well written book, but it's a quick read and the writing/plotting is not utterly terrible -- somehow I did finish it (mostly on the Acela corridor hurtling north from our nation's capital, no less) after all. Yet I am not the book's intended audience; this is really a work of chick lit that happens to tangentially involve foreign policy, and it is only because of my own amateur interest in the latter that I picked it up in the first place. So my rating is based on the novel's rather limited success in achieving it's ancillary goal of offering commentary/satire on "the blob".

First the spoiler free aspects, focusing on the element of satire. This book is not as funny as it thinks it is. Indeed, the comedic element is simply the dysfunction of the national security bureacracy, but this fails on a couple of levels. It reads as if intended to elicit knowing chuckles from current and former denizens of that bureacracy and guffaws of disbelief from the uninitiated, and I'm sure for some readers it does so. The first level on which this fails to hit home (at least for me) is that the "ridiculous" aspects of working at the Pentagon, while indeed eminently worthy of ridicule, seem completely anodyne and expected, rather than hilarious or over the top. Somehow I can't imagine anyone moderately well versed in recent (especially post Cold War) American history could be surprised by (or find funny/endearing) the notion of severe incompetence at all levels of the national security policy process, masked only by a veneer of patriotism and fancy military hardware.

On a deeper level, I think this book misses what makes successful satire tick, both for workplace settings (e.g. The Office) and military ones (e.g. Catch-22). Such successful satires certainly *feature* extreme incompetence, but they don't *revolve* around it. After all, it is not news to 21st century TV viewers that employees at a paper company in Scranton might not be bringing their A game. Nor was it news to a generation that just lived through Pearl Harbor and the Korean War that the US military does not always operate like a well-oiled machine. Rather, the reason these types of satires work is that they revel in the absurdism and escalate the incompetence up to and beyond its logical conclusion. (Another good example might be the male models perishing in a gasoline fight in Zoolander.) This book fails to depict a suitably comedic apotheosis of Pentagon incompetence because - ultimately - it is too earnest.

In discussing the author's insufficient cynicism, we are now venturing into spoiler territory; you have been warned.

I came away with this impression primarily because of what *wasn't* in the novel, despite being seemingly fertile territory for a satire of Pentagon failure. There is no discussion, for example, of procurement, technology boondoggles, corruption, etc. Indeed, defense contractors get only the briefest of cameos (in the context of the lifestyle of a Congressional staffer, not that of a Pentagon bureaucrat), and even *budgets* are given short shrift.

I was also bemused that a novel constructed around the conceit of a "red herring" plot focused on Moldova and US-Russia great power politics barely mentions Transnistria at all.

Covert operations and policy options also get no mention, which seemed like perhaps the novel's single greatest failure in terms of verisimilitude.

I'm obviously not sure why these sorts of things didn't end up in the book, even though they would seem to fit the theme. But I might speculate that the reason has to do with the author being culturally "of" the Blob milieu, and hence dispositionally unable to mock her subject matter in a wholehearted way. And that is the fundamental reason the book does not succeed.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

MB Nikitin

Great read! True to life characters, relatable prose

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

An insider’s peek into the DC national security world with plenty of relatable as well as surprising (shocking?) characters. Idealism clashes with bureaucracy, personal struggles with professional, and a young woman’s formative first job in the Pentagon is romp and a tear-jerker all at once. The unique informal prose, full of irony and vulnerability, gives the reader an intimate connection to the main character and keeps the plotline rolling.

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jenny L. Clark

Intelligent, Funny, & Meaningful. LOVED IT!!!

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2018

Verified Purchase

LOVED this book. If you enjoy books by Janet Evanovich & Penny Reid this might be for you too. The main character (doctor who starts work in the Pentagon but is "reassigned" the first day) is SMART, imperfect, relatable, and absolutely fabulous! This book also has HEART. The what you do is important but, also, the WHY (heart). Parts will make you laugh. Parts will also hit you in the "feels". Story line keeps you interested. Characters are well developed. WORTH the time and money to give this book a go! LOVED IT! For those of you working in the Pentagon: THANK YOU for your service! THANK YOU!!! (And, please, fight against the "dumbing it down" every chance you get!)

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Jamie K

Buy this book NOW!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2019

Verified Purchase

A can't-put-this-down read that uniquely portrays the ups and downs of working in the Pentagon. Touching on the divides between academics and practitioners, military officials and civilians, men and women (and much, much more), McInnis thoughtfully depicts the challenges and fulfillment faced daily by those working in foreign policy. A must-read for any up and comer thinking about diving into the natsec world!

See all reviews

Buy new:

$9.98

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon Paperback – September 25, 2018

Enhance your purchase

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Kathleen J. McInnis

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new: $9.98

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon Paperback – September 25, 2018

Enhance your purchase

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Kathleen J. McInnis

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$9.98