Book Review: Argo by Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio

About:

Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio is a non-fiction book telling of the rescue of six American embassy workers in 1976. The book was later made into an award winning movie.

• 320 pages
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670026220

My Rat­ing for Argo — 5

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Thoughts:

Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio is a fascinating and well written book about an operation which was declassified by President Clinton.

The book does not only tell of the operation, the movie only shows a small part of this book. Mr. Mendez talks about what was behind the storming of embassy, his career with the CIA and how things worked in his part of the agency.

I found the parts of the book about the craft of spying (books of which I enjoy very much) to be the most interesting. The mindset once need to have, the attention to detail and the difficulties that one faces. Mr. Mendez tells about other extractions which prepared him for this assignment.

I really enjoyed the movie, but the book is much better. Some of the scenes in the movie (the silly chase in the end, for example) were ridiculous and I felt they actually took away from the story. If you liked the movie, this book is a wonderful accompaniment to it, if you didn’t, you’ll still like the book and if you didn’t see the movie it’s probably even better.

While the escape of the six Americans is not as dramatic as was shown in the movie, it was still a huge accomplishment by Mendez and his team. I know some readers were disappointed of the padding around the central story, I found the inner workings of the CIA to be interesting and fascinating.

Buy this book in paper or elec­tor­nic format*

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I borrowed this book from the local library.
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account