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Read by the author, with the recording produced by Penguin Audio.

Reviewed by Ryan Paul Winn

Much ink has been spilled recounting successful covert actions: But author Vince Houghton spins these into a fresh perspective, chronicling inventors’ epic flops and failed plans. The historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, tracks doomed projects and reveals how unrelenting pressure from the top led to the ridiculous.

“If necessity is the mother of invention,” Houghton writes, “Desperation is the drunk uncle.” The reading of his own words imbues concepts straight out of Mad magazine, invoking laughter and horror in equal measure.

Ryan Paul Winn is a columnist and media critic who’s rarely without an audiobook or his earbuds. When not writing or teaching in the Liberal Studies department at College of Menominee Nation in Keshena, Wisconsin, he can be found researching overlooked history in local and national archives.