Just read UC and enjoyed the heck out of it, but I am nonetheless reluctant to recommend it. The reason: I'm afraid a lot of the history "isn't." Mr. Ross likes to punch up the drama of his vignettes, but in so doing breaks the promise in his preface that he "re-created historical events to the best of his ability."
The most blatant example of this is his account of the initial ATF raid at Waco. Ross has Koresh coming out the front door right at the start of the raid, which he did, with a 2-year-old on his shoulder. The 2-year-old is a fabrication. Ross then takes the melodrama to the extreme of having an ATF agent shoot the 2-year-old dead. I have seen the video of Koresh at the door. He comes out, starts to speak, then quickly retreats as shots ring out. As soon as he ducks back in, bullet holes appear in the door. All this is quite damming enough of the ATF. Their idea of warrant service was to attempt to assassinate Koresh. There was no need to invent a murdered 2-year-old at this point, but Ross did it.
A more minor misstatement was in a part where someone was recounting WWII history. It was stated that the Germans could have overrun France faster if they hadn't had huge forces engaged fighting the Russians. Actually, there was no war with Russia in May and June of 1940, when the battle of France took place. Hitler would not attack Russia until June of 1941. It's also hard to believe the Germans could have overrun France any faster than they actually did.
These are just the examples that stuck in my mind; other things did not ring true to me at the time I read the book, but I have no desire to pore through it looking for discrepancies. My feeling at this time, however, is that Ross is a storyteller with the habit, common to raconteurs, of enhancing the facts to juice up his stories. This is very problematic in the case of UC, since many attempt to treat it as a source for information on government misdeeds.
I think UC is best viewed as a fantasy of the gun culture. The more "gun culture" you are, the more you are likely to enjoy it. I'm really not all that "gunnish," I own guns but don't shoot a lot and don't hang around with gun people. I enjoyed the book but doubtless missed a lot of the insider references. For me, it punched a lot of the same buttons as a Tom Clancy novel. Clancy writes melodramas of honorable men of action forcibly destroying the schemes of evildoers; UC is the same.
The last section, detailing the "insurrection," can only be enjoyed as a fantasy requiring, in my case, a very conscious suspension of disbelief at many points. It raised no moral issues for me because I could not take it seriously as a realistic sceneario. It was just a shoot-em-up created to allow one to enjoy seeing the bad guys get blown away. I fully understand the attraction of imagining just wasting the aggravating and venal anti-gun types. This fantasy is a harmless indulgence unless one makes the mistake of taking it seriously.
Botton line--enjoy UC as a fantasy novel; don't rely on it as a social or political testament.
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