this is an excellent book, where Professor Jervis offers a balanced and comprehensive view of intelligence analysis and how it and its producers relate to policy makers and the policy context that both sets of actors operate within. while this is certainly not a book for beginners, as the reader will require a solid basis of understanding in international relations, security, diplomacy, and intelligence, but Professor Jarvis is describing a world that is exceedingly complex and in which he tries and succeeds to break down into more digestible bites for any curious reader. he succeeds most in his fair and balanced analyzes of the psychological States of politicians and intelligence officers, and uses these psychological perspectives to explain why decisions are made and why mishaps may occur. an excellent example of this is the discussion of wmd Iraq in 2003, specifically how Professor Jervis contracts the seemingly pre decided need of the Bush administration to label Iraq as a hostile regime, versus an intelligence community which either did not adequately Express or was not received through their message that Saddam had many indicators of interest or possession in acquiring extremely dangerous weapons, but the fixation on the colon Powell presentation, and narrowly looking for yellow cake, plutonium 234, aluminum tubes, or centrifuges, obscures the overall pattern of behavior that Saddam was exhibiting at the time, and which may have been more useful in providing a convincing intelligence analysis to policy makers at the time. in short professor jervis’s book is indispensable for anyone in the intelligence or policy communities, or anyone in the public interested in a well-researched and very informative book from one of the fields all time great scholars. Rest in Peace Professor Jervis.