an important book, one that will ruffle feathers in need of ruffling and that will be useful to legislators, policymakers and historians alike. The author is also curiously reluctant to judge most of the characters in her narrative her effort to humanize even the most badly behaved and incompetent agents has an oddly flattening effect, leaving readers with no clear villains to blame for the Secret Service’s failings and no clear heroes to admire, either. But a new book, 'Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service' from The Washington Post's Carol Leonnig, paints an alarmingly different picture of the agency being 'in a state of. There are simply too many characters jostling for attention in a book that covers more than six decades, and even Leonnig’s skillful writing can’t quite overcome the numbing impact of so much detail. Zero Fail isn’t an easy read: Weighing in at nearly 500 pages of text, its sheer exhaustiveness is at times exhausting, and Leonnig struggles to bring life to what can feel like an unending chronicle of failures and missteps. Page by page and detail by implacable detail, she walks us through a catalogue of Secret Service blunders. Leonnig.is thorough and unsparing in her account. Carol Leonnig offers a powerful antidote to Hollywood fantasies.
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