The Secret World: A History of Intelligence

Very long read, but well worth it. I glossed over the mythological references (only the first 7% of the entire book anyway). Everything else was very cool to learn the details of.

This was a very, very detailed account of the history of intelligence that lacked a coherent narrative and had a lot of snippets of facts vaguely strung together by chronological order.

Overall, I would say that unless one has a very good understanding of military history spanning from practically the beginning of man to about a decade ago, then you're going to end up quite lost, or at least Googling lots of things for clarification, which can be fun if you know that's what you're in for. Places, names, events randomly pop up and a note about their spying or ability to gather intelligence is briefly mentioned before quickly moving onto the next place, person or random moment in time. There were many times that I had to go back to see if I had skipped some transition in the text to see if the book had moved on to a different time period as random facts from different periods were introduced in the middle of a story of one battle.

The last third of the book had a coherent narrative and a greater depth of analysis than the rest of it. I would give that part 4 stars.

I listened to this on Audible, and the reading on my version by Laurence Kennedy (this was UK Audible, sometimes US Audible has a different reader) was especially flat and horrible, so I wouldn't recommend him.

The book is interesting and overall a decent read, though I would avoid listening to the Laurence Kennedy version.