Puzzle Palace

By: David Alexander

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Author David Alexander's Puzzle Palace is a remarkable achievement. The Pentagon is more than building, symbol or icon; from almost the first moment of its construction it became one of the world’s most critical power centers. Puzzle Palace tells the story of the Pentagon from its beginnings in the years between the two World Wars to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and beyond in panoramic prose that combines virtuoso writing with sure-handed scholarship and penetrating insights. Puzzle Palace is nonfiction that is written with a novelist's brilliance and a scholar's keenly balanced sense of historical perspective. The book is a crowning achievement for David Alexander, who has succeeded in elevating journalism to the lofty heights of narrative history as few authors before him have been able to do. While there have been glimpses inside the Defense Department and the Pentagon before, no one until now has published a comprehensive and detailed report on the often arcane inner workings of the mammoth defense establishment of the United States and its embodiment in the sprawling government building that houses it. As one of the most important works of investigative journalism to have come out of Washington in years, this fascinating book should be on the must-read list of everyone concerned with America's growing list of military commitments around the world. Puzzle Palace is beyond a doubt the best-written book on a major nonfiction theme to appear in a very long time. From the first page to the last, there is the unmistakable voice that sets the true writer off from the ranks of media clones and corporate pretenders with at best superficial narrative powers. David Alexander's Puzzle Palace has the guts and grit and sweat and muscle of the powerful personalities that built the Pentagon from the ground up using practically nothing but sand and water, and the determination to do the impossible in record time. Like the builders of the Pentagon themselves, author David Alexander has seemingly done the impossible; he has brought to life the incredible story of the Pentagon and the role it has played from Pearl Harbor to the War in Iraq and beyond to the present. This is truly a nonfiction book that reads like the best of fast-paced adventure fiction. Puzzle Palace is a remarkable achievement. It proves that once David Alexander gets a story in his sights and cocks the hammer, scoring a bull's eye is inevitable.