Having left his government job to pursue other ventures, in this memoir Ames Holbrook looks back on his time as a Detention and Deportation Office in the agency now known as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. He uses this memoir to share what he has learned from his time on he job, and to reveal the glaring inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the government's efforts to deport criminal aliens. I feel compelled to emphasize that Holbrook focuses on criminal aliens: the people he deports are rapists, murderers, drug dealers, pedophile sex-offenders, and worse. Many of them are repeat offenders. And every day, the government is leaking these people out of detention and back onto the American streets.

This book is intended to incite outrage, but I think you'd have to be somewhat of an insider already for a lot of the government's foibles to make sense. Naturally we don't want criminals on the street -- but the red-tape holding up the deportation process and sabotaging counter-terrorism efforts isn't fully explained in this memoir. Of course, once you've been on the inside as long as Holbrook was, it may be hard to talk to the general public.

On the other hand, what really surprised me about this book was the prose. I had expected laborious government-ese -- facts and figures and really dry writing -- but the memoir reads quite like a novel in places. Check out this gem: "An incendiary mood brewed in him, and his face grew rosy in the bracket of his beard" (p. 31). Such elegant prose does make me wonder about the strict veracity of the account, but at least it makes for a more enjoyable read along the way.

Overall, it's definitely a worthwhile read. It doesn't cast our government in a particularly positive light, but I don't think that any of the claims are exaggerated or even unfair. That said, brace yourself for an angsty and rocky text, and one that has the potential to be mind-blowingly revealing.