The Brothers

Title: The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War
Author: Stephen Kinzer
Genre: History
Pages: 416
Rating (out of 5 stars): *** 1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles were the Secretary of State and the head of the CIA, respectively, under Eisenhower.  Working jointly as the overt and covert foreign policy directors for the U.S., this book describes their shaping of American foreign policy during the darkest times of the Cold War.
Thoughts: I've joined a men's book club, and this was the first book of the year.  It was extremely fascinating, and I'm surprised that I had never heard much about the Dulles brothers, despite the fact that a major airport is named after them.  The book is really well-written with amazing details (from de-classified documents) about the secret workings of the Cold War in the U.S. that I knew nothing about.  My only complaint is that it's clear the the author really hates the Dulles brothers, and his bias taints nearly all of the book.  It's clear that Foster and Allen were no saints and did plenty of bad things (with Eisenhower's sanction), but I would have preferred for Kinzer to just tell the story, and let the reader come to that conclusion on their own.  Other than that, though, this was fascinating and really taught me a lot about a period of U.S. history that I knew almost nothing about.
Disclaimer: I ran out of time to quite finish this book before our book group met, so I didn't get all the way through, but read enough to feel confident saying that it's quite clean.