There are some great things in this book. I especially liked the accounts by Indonesian victims of 1965 and the American diplomat Howard P. Jones . The author told the stories of these witnesses to history responsibly and integrated them into a historical narrative. The author does a service to Indonesian voices that have never been heard before. However, I do not recommend this book for two reasons. The first is that while it reveals a lot of important background about the CIA methods for engineering coups, the book doesn’t end up proving its principal thesis that the events of 1964-65 constituted a “Jakarta Method" by American actors. The second is that it’s poorly written. When discussing Suharto’s 1964 coup and the ensuing mass murders of 1965, historians integrate internal and external causes. It is a complex state failure, not a Disney story with a single villain behind everything. The internal economic situation in Indonesia declined in the early 1960s after an initi...