The New York Times - Jennifer Senior
…raises bedeviling questions about the nature of human agency, and reminds us that we send everyday, messy people with everyday, messy hearts to fight our wars…Ranger Games is in part a family story, about the unlikely bond between two very different cousins. It is also a fascinating tutorial on the psychology of modern warfare and social coercion…Alex's motives may be of personal interest to Blum, but the richest case study on display here—it would fit snugly into any psychological textbook—is of [Luke Elliott] Sommer. He's brilliant, seductive and dangerous, a Hannibal Lecter without the taste for human liver over fava beans.
Publishers Weekly - Audio
11/27/2017
Voice actor McClain briskly recounts the story of Alex Blum, a straight-arrow 19-year-old who joined the army out of high school and participated in an armed bank robbery with two fellow soldiers days before he was set deploy to Iraq. The book, written by his cousin Ben, attempts to unravel the confused and suspect motivations behind Blum’s uncharacteristic actions, and the several conflicting explanations for his involvement in the crime proffered by his defense lawyers, Blum and his co-conspirators, and his family. Is he a victim of brainwashing? Did he really believe the heist was an organized army simulation? Was he just acting out? Narrator McClain does a terrific job of guiding listeners through this complex story as attitudes toward Alex shift. He vividly captures the book’s watershed moment, Alex’s appearance on the Dr. Phil show, nailing the emotional weight of the scene and the show host’s folksy aphorisms. The book’s narrative arc makes it well suited for the audio format, and McClain is more than competent. A Doubleday hardcover. (Sept.)
Publishers Weekly
★ 05/29/2017
This engrossing true-crime saga follows a twisting labyrinth of confused and suspect motivations. In 2006 Blum’s cousin Alex Blum, a straight-arrow 19-year-old in an elite Army Ranger battalion, was the getaway driver in an armed robbery of a Tacoma bank involving four accomplices, one of whom was a higher-ranking Ranger named Luke Elliott Sommer. Alex’s arrest shocked his family, as did his unlikely excuse: he thought the robbery was a special-ops training exercise he had to participate in. Trying to make sense of this, Blum embarked on a years-long quest to suss out the factors that shaped Alex’s actions: his adulation of the military; the sadistic Ranger training regimen that turned recruits into obedient killers (in 2010 Alex went on Dr. Phil as a poster boy for psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s theory of “coercive social influence” in military culture); and the malign authority of Sommer, a charismatic but troubled man whose schemes embodied Ranger machismo and who gets a fascinating profile from the author. In a triumph of subtle reportage, Blum sleuths through the mind games enshrouding the heist while painting sympathetic but clear-eyed portraits of its perpetrators; the result is an unsettling dissection of the moral corruptions, small and great, that bedevil the culture of military honor. Agent: Tina Bennett, William Morris Endeavor. (Sept.) Correction: An earlier version of this review listed the incorrect literary agency.
From the Publisher
ONE OF THE STRANGER'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"A gloriously good writer...Ranger Games is both surprising and moving...A memorable, novelistic account."
—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
“Saga and social science both, a riveting exploration of the codes of conduct by which men are meant to comport themselves, the lengths to which we go to forge identity, and how far the stories we tell can be stretched before they become prisons of our own making… Blum is remarkably empathetic, offering heartbreaking portraits… If [he] begins as the odd piece in the family puzzle, his precise, exhaustive and sympathetic work proves both deeply salutary and in step with the logistician’s mind.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Captivating… a riveting exploration of the malleability of memory and the stories we choose to tell — to others and to ourselves… Blum is as gifted with language as he is with numbers, and Ranger Games is an extraordinary book, a thrilling, bumpy journey into the complexities of the mind, with its capacity to protect and betray — often within the very same moment…Surprisingly poignant.”
—The Washington Post
“An uncompromising search for the truth and a stirring testament to the healing power of writing…. Surprising and cathartic.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Finely written and reported…. Surprising.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A triumph of subtle reportage…. An unsettling dissection of the moral corruptions, small and great, that bedevil the culture of military honor.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A vigorous, empathetic chronicle of a crime.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"On a simple level, Ranger Games is about Ben Blum’s obsessive quest to understand why his 19-year-old cousin participated in an inexplicable, ham-handed bank robbery that landed him in prison and nearly destroyed the people he loved. But there is nothing simple about Blum’s book. It turns out to be a labyrinthine, utterly engrossing meditation on matters as seemingly disparate as the perils of loyalty, the seductive force of mathematical certainty, the toxicity of “honor,” the Stanford Prison Experiment, the weirdness of daytime television, and the dangerous power of family mythology. It is an astonishing book, unlike anything else I have ever read."
—Jon Krakauer, New York Times bestselling author of Missoula and Into Thin Air
"Ranger Games is a rare and totally original work of nonfiction. The odd characters and dangerous situations live vibrantly in these pages and the stakes are always high. Ben Blum's search for truth leads him down many paths into an inner turmoil and boil about family, fidelity, identity, good and evil, and military service. Once you start reading you won't put it down."
—Anthony Swofford, New York Times bestselling author of Jarhead and Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir
Library Journal
08/01/2017
Blum's debut book sheds light on a romantic vision of war. In 2006, the author's 19-year-old cousin Alex was a promising army ranger—until he participated in an armed robbery of a Bank of America along with his superior Luke Elliott Sommer and three acquaintances. The underlying question for all involved: Why? Was Alex the victim of brainwashing or a hoax? Blum follows Alex's attempts to rebuild his life after losing friends, housing, and work because of his felony status. He interviews numerous relatives, such as Alex's dad, Norm, who supported his son even as his own marriage crumbled. Blum also questions Sommer, who experienced PTSD after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The author successfully interweaves his own family's complicated relationship with mental illness, race, and privilege into the recounting of Sommer's psychiatric history. After finding inconsistencies in Alex's and Sommer's stories, Blum isn't sure of his own truth and doesn't expect readers to be either. VERDICT A detailed, sobering account of people doing what they believe is right in the face of injustice. For fans of biographies, military stories, true crime, and podcasts such as Serial and S-Town.—Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
What would incite an Army Ranger with a spotless record and boundless potential to rob a bank and throw his career away? That’s the question Ben Blum sets out to answer in this outstanding piece of personal journalism about his cousin Alex, who committed this inexplicable crime. Narrator Johnathan McClain’s pacing is ideal. He carries the narrative briskly along, using more intensity when needed but without slipping into melodrama. He provides subtle vocal shifts for the various characters, including a passable Canadian accent for Blum’s partner in crime, a British Columbia–born Ranger who incited the robbery. Ultimately, Blum is unable to provide definitive answers, but he asks challenging questions about the way elite soldiers are trained. D.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-06-13
A vigorous, empathetic chronicle of a crime foretold—or at least engendered, possibly, on a boot camp drill field.Though the mostly peace-minded citizens of Tacoma, Washington, may not know it, the military-industrial complex looms large there, with a joint Air Force and Army base constituting the area's largest employer by far. Blum tells the story of a group of four soldiers, including the author's cousin, Alex, who donned blue jeans and ski masks and tried to boost a bank. The news of the subsequent arrest shocked the respectable, intellectually competitive Blum family. "Alex was the most squeaky-clean, patriotic, rule-respecting kid we knew," writes the author, who digs into the case to tease out why an Army Ranger, part of a unit already under the spotlight for having tortured prisoners in Iraq, did something so transgressive. Among the theories the legal defense tested, he finds the notion that the heist was the result of a kind of brainwashing to be somewhat compelling, while the thought that the robbery was a training exercise isn't as absurd as it might appear on the face: "As far as Alex was concerned," one of his fellow soldiers says, "it wasn't real." In time, Blum looks closely at a charismatic leader who cooked up the scheme as an exercise in sociopathy and convinced his comrades to take part because it was cool and fun. "With him," writes the author, memorably, "you could become Donkey Kong or Cobra Commander or Wile E. Coyote, swallowing a pound of TNT and exploding and reconstituting again in time to pant so hard at a passing pretty girl that your tongue spilled out onto the floor." In the end, Blum writes, judge and jury did not accept any such Looney Tunes scenario, and how they arrived at their verdict affords the author some fine courtroom back and forth. A lighthearted romp à la Ocean's Eleven it's not, but Blum's well-wrought account suggests that any crime is possible so long as it's made out to be a game.
