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📚🚨 Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa

Not a Book Report

I enjoy reflecting on the movies, TV, books and other media that I consume. I’m notoriously sentimental. This series documents the books that I read. These aren’t reviews or recommendations. Just a list. For me. Mostly so that I can page through what I read, where I was, and when.

Why did I read it?

I flew across the Atlantic Ocean 22 times last year. Only 4 of those 11 distinct trips involved direct flights from Lisbon to my final destination. I spent a lot of time bored in airports. On one of those trips I strolled through the Book People store in the Austin airport searching for something to read on my AUS-EWR-LIS route, at least until I could sleep on the EWR-LIS leg. I saw this and grabbed it having read clippings of it in the news and I figured I could chew through it.

What is it?

Category Value
Title Peril
Author Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
Year Published 2021
Format Hardcover
Pages 418
ISBN 978-1-9821-8291-5

Peril

How did I read it?

Category Value
Date Started August 27, 2022
Date Finished March 27, 2023
Places Read Austin
United Flights
Sintra
Lisbon

Notes - No Spoilers

  • We have such short attention spans! Several events covered in this book, like the “upside down Bible military march to that church”, are things that I had almost forgotten. The entire time I read this book was mostly me just muttering “oh God, yeah, that happened too.”
  • Some moments of the book were downright terrifying to revisit. We were so close to squandering the Experiment. What scares me now is the subtitle of this post - feels like we forgot that. Or, maybe we didn’t, but some decided to forget it.
  • Watching many of these scenes from Portugal felt so weird at the time and reading this book, again mostly in Portugal, still feels odd. A strange survivor’s guilt. I was living this idyllic existence in a beautiful European country while a far right blowhard in horns and furs stood at the podium in Congress.
  • I remember being on a call with a coworker as January 6th unfoled and we just wrapped up the meeting - we couldn’t focus on the work while we watched the Capitol under siege. The play-by-play in this book kept reminding me of how jaw dropping that evening felt.
  • I put this book down frequently and read other things. I wound up clocking in at 7 months from start to finish. The book spends the last ~20% covering the Biden campaign and I struggled to keep paying attention. I know, I know - that part is supposed to be the uplifting third act that restores democracy. And I’m someone who had a teacher from my high school in Texas call my mom to warn her that I was a democrat! Shameful as this is, I mostly picked up the book to revisit the chaos.

Published Mar 29, 2023

Austinite in Lisbon. VP of Product at Cloudflare.