Ranger Games

Starred review from May 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, Janklow & Nesbit.

July 1, 2017
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 a 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.

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August 1, 2017
This debut work is a stunningly well-executed examination of one man's abrupt fall into disgrace and another man's fascination with that fall. The men (one, a gung-ho U.S. Army Ranger on his way to Iraq in 2006; the other, the author of this book) grew up together as cousins in Colorado. The defining moment for author Blum's cousin Alex, and for this wrenching book, was Alex's sudden and seemingly inexplicable involvement in a bank robbery on the verge of his being shipped to Iraq, a moment that blew up his life and those of his relatives. Blum spent seven years puzzling out this act, interviewing Alex, family members, and friends. He also investigates the Ranger culture that instills blind obedience, and the evil influence that one special-operations commander held over Alex. The result is a well-researched, spellbinding work of narrative nonfiction that opens up the psychology of Ranger training, as well as giving the reader a compassionate view of the interlocking forces that can feed into one spectacularly bad decision.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

August 1, 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

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2017

Why would an upright young man, determined to become a U.S. Army Ranger, join with two fellow soldiers and two strangers the day before his deployment to Iraq and commit armed robbery at a bank in Tacoma? Blum's cousin Alex claimed that he thought the robbery was simply part of the Ranger program's push-to-the-edge training. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.