Dale Maharidge

This book does have a couple of instances of swearing.

It feels so wrong, yet so right to read this book.

If you think you've read and watched everything else related to Ed Snowden, then you're missing an important piece. The box. Which this book tells all about.

“the focus of our book was the human relationships that shepherded Snowden’s box — rather than the material inside”

How much of this story is actually true? That I don't know, but as the book mentions,

“systems are only as reliable as the people who operate them.
“When it all boils down to it,” he concluded, “it is all about personal trust.””

Stories are a great way to hook someone in, and it's interesting the approach that this book took.

““Thanks for making me laugh so hard,” Laura wrote to both of us the next day. It was the last time I’d laugh for a while.”

It's fascinating how the book is structured, telling the main story first, then adding details, then talking about US history and the future.

If you aren't interested in US history, or the US in general, then I feel you can finish the book once the author's dive into that. I felt they expanded too far away from “the box”, and they had to fill the book to be a certain number of pages.

“Society evolves when people can test boundaries and experiment with ways of living outside the mainstream. In a climate of total surveillance, such innovations would halt. The culture would stagnate and conformity would reign.”

“It also reflected what I consider to be one of the great lessons of adulthood: that most of the institutions and endeavors we regard as ironclad — from parenting to politics — are actually held together with chewing gum and duct tape. Nothing truly works, at least not for long, or not in the way it’s supposed to.”… (meer)

The book is a journey of a son for his father. A father that avoided a traumatic event as a young man during WWII. A USMC Marine faced with the greatest of trials and tribulations. In the son's search to find a lost Marine (a photo of Mulligan and the father, which was kept by him), the son learns more about the cost of war and the impact it had on young men. What is surprising -- though perhaps not, given all that war entails -- is that thousands and thousands of unknown or never found service personnel from that war remain.… (meer)