When I got this book, I was afraid it would be all thriller, no facts. Having read it, I would characterize it as all facts, very few thrills. It seems to be exhaustively researched and is fairly well written. Not light reading, but an interesting perspective on Central America during World War I. ( )

This is an interesting examination of how intelligence work used to be carried out and something of a period study, via the focus of examining the career of Mayanist Sylvanus Morley during World War I. That said, the sad thing about this book is that it's marred by heavy-handed accusations of lack of patriotic fervor in the last few chapters; both against the noted social scientist Franz Boas and against the Academy of today. I don't know enough about Harris and Sadler to accuse them of bad faith, but the snide tone they adopt is best left to the world of live journals. This is not to mention that while Boas may not have been "100-percent American" enough for World War I America, even a cursory examination of the issue at Wikipedia would suggest that the men who tried to purge him from the social science establishment of the time were not exactly professionally disinterested either. No sense of this is given by Harris & Sadler and it makes one distrust the rest of their interpretation. ( )