Review: The room where it happened

Yesterday I finally made it through John Bolton’s book “The room where it happened” and I thought I should at least write a very brief review about the style and structure instead of the content.

The book is written in the first person in a way that feels like a memory protocol. In 15 chapters Mr Bolton describes his experience as National Security Advisor including the time leading up to it, sometimes chronologically, sometimes topically organized which made it hard to know which year he was talking about from time to time. This jumping around also made it, for instance, hard to determine the state of the relationship between the author and Mike Pompeo. Most of the time they seemed to be the biggest allies bordering to a friendship, while in the end that degree of trust has gone missing. Luckily, that didn’t distract too much from the underlying message.

Weirdly my personal highlight was the epilogue where Mr Bolton describes in broad terms the review and editorial process, which was just entertaining. That epilogue pushed the book beyond a 3 out of 5 for me 😅

Over the years I've written quite a few reviews 🙂 You can find them at /reviews/.