...an uncompromising search for the truth and a stirring testament to the healing power of writing ... Ranger Games is a book that rewards a reader’s patience. The book isn’t straightforward reportage, but rather a chronicle of Ben Blum’s search for the truth behind his cousin’s baffling fall from grace. As such, the shifting chronology and contradictory stories about the robbery are sometimes hard to follow. As the book builds to its powerful conclusion, however, it becomes evident that this apparent confusion is a conscious strategy on the writer’s part, taking the reader along on the writer’s own obsessive hunt for the truth, which is buried in the multiple versions of the story concocted by the robbery’s participants, their families, the news media and the law. As such, Ranger Games is a rich and demanding exploration of the perils and rewards of truth seeking: It will repay successive readings with insight into the intricacies of the human psyche.

Ranger Games raises bedeviling questions about the nature of human agency, and reminds us that we send everyday, messy people with everyday, messy hearts to fight our wars ... Ranger Games is in part a family story, about the unlikely bond between two very different cousins. It is also a fascinating tutorial on the psychology of modern warfare and social coercion ... The tragicomic chapters about this episode alone are worth the price of the book. I spun through them, the pages whipping by like an old-school Rolodex. If you already detest Dr. Phil, they will shore up your conviction that he is indeed worth detesting. Alex’s motives may be of personal interest to Blum, but the richest case study on display here — it would fit snugly into any psychological textbook — is of Sommer. He’s brilliant, seductive and dangerous, a Hannibal Lecter without the taste for human liver over fava beans...To keep the mystery going, Blum even periodically wonders whether he should believe Sommer. It feels like a narrative feint. That Sommer is a malignant lunatic is spectacularly obvious quite early on. Blum’s book suffers, too, from a slight engineering problem. He sometimes repeats parts of Alex’s story, ostensibly to layer them with more perspectives and information each time, but the information he adds is often insufficient to warrant the retellings ... But by the book’s end — it’s both surprising and moving — readers are likely to overlook these objections.

The main question with which he grapples in this finely written and reported (but overlong) memoir is why his law-abiding cousin chose to commit a criminal act ... Determined to investigate, Blum finds it hard to get consistent answers from his cousin. So, in a surprising narrative twist, he seeks out Sommer, whom Alex's testimony had helped convict. The robbery's ringleader may well be a classic psychopath, but it's hard to know for sure. He and the Rangers both 'dressed up violence in myth and ritual' and 'normalized killing, bloodthirstiness, ruthlessness, and domination,' Blum writes. In any case, Blum's conversations with the smart, seductive Sommer shed doubt on Alex's version of events.

The result is saga and social science both, a riveting exploration of the codes of conduct by which men are meant to comport themselves, the lengths to which we go to forge identity, and how far the stories we tell can be stretched before they become prisons of our own making … Mr. Blum chronicles the cost of clinging to untenable truths. Norm’s insistence on seeing Alex as a victim turned the uncle he has known as ‘a looming grin machine’ into a broken man on the verge of bankruptcy … If Mr. Blum begins as the odd piece in the family puzzle, his precise, exhaustive and sympathetic work proves both deeply salutary and in step with the logistician’s mind.

The book offers no shocking, whispered confession (a la The Jinx) nor a heartfelt attempt at exoneration (Making a Murderer). Instead, it is a riveting exploration of the malleability of memory and the stories we choose to tell — to others and to ourselves … As Blum delves deeper into the mystery, math and logic remain his secret weapons. Despite his growing affection for his cousin, he is able to acknowledge that some of Alex’s statements do not add up … Blum is as gifted with language as he is with numbers, and Ranger Games is an extraordinary book, a thrilling, bumpy journey into the complexities of the mind, with its capacity to protect and betray — often within the very same moment.

...a frequently riveting book ... Ben Blum’s account of the way basic training and—especially—the subsequent Ranger Indoctrination Program (since renamed) broke down his cousin’s good-natured personality and turned him into an obedient potential killer is more than a little terrifying. Alex and his fellow trainees are subjected to sleep deprivation, days of wet, near freezing conditions and constant ritual humiliation at the hands of drill sergeants ... Readers who take a dimmer view of human nature than Ben Blum does won’t be surprised. But Blum tells such a good story you can’t begrudge him his redemptive therapeutic ending. It’s his family. You sense that his underlying mission is to save his cousin from the fate of their grandfather—who, it’s revealed, wasn’t much of a saint or hero in the war—and of their uncle Kurt, both of whom committed suicide.

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.

A vigorous, empathetic chronicle of a crime foretold—or at least engendered, possibly, on a boot camp drill field ... A lighthearted romp à 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.