Pentagon

David Alexander has brought his keen and discriminating eye for lyrical prose to his epic account of the Pentagon, truly making this outstanding work of nonfiction "history as the novel, the novel as history."


In undertaking as large and ambitious a project as Pentagon, Alexander developed a writing plan that replaced an easy and often-used sequential storyline approach with a more complex narrative scheme designed to give far greater scope and depth to the narrative he envisioned for the book. 


It seemed the only approach worthy of a subject as large, as timely, as challenging and as supremely important as the Pentagon, the Defense Department and the global wars in which these icons of military power and global presence have played key and decisive strategic roles.


In telling the Pentagon's story Alexander abandoned the strict chronological storytelling format characteristic of other works and wove together a tapestry in prose that drew on disciplines ranging from the technicalities of the building construction trades, to the secrets of stealth warfare, to the intricacies of foreign policy, to the stratagems and behind-the-scenes gambits of international leadership, to the workings of the defense firms that together make up the global defense sector. 


There has always been much more to the Pentagon than concrete, limestone and steel. In Pentagon, award-winning author David Alexander delivers the inside story on the institutions, events and personalities that have made the Pentagon the global icon that it is and was from the beginning.