This book was a page-turner for me. It takes what might seem to be boring historical documents and explains their significance. It is not a long work: I blasted through it in one sitting. Sometimes the "little stories" help us understand political affairs more than big ones. ( )

Declassified selects and presents 50 documents relating to important events of world history, and gives a few pages of explanation for each event. However the documents themselves do not get the prominence you would expect from the title of the book. Many of the reproductions of the documents are of poor quality and illegible. What would have been nice would have been a transcript of the documents, with translations as well.
For example, the first document, the letter about the Spanish Armada, is illegible, and is mentioned only briefly in the account of the Armada. There is no way of knowing what the letter actually says. Another example is Chapter 19, about the 1956 “Berlin Tunnel”. The document for this chapter is the transcript of an intercepted conversation, but again it is illegible, and in German, and gets just a one line reference in the chapter without any reference as to its content.
The book’s concept is good, but it does not live up to its title.

4656. Declassified 50 Top-Secret Documents That Changed History, by Thomas B. Allen (read 27 Dec 2009) This book examines 50 documents which "changed history." Two or three pages are devoted to each document--some are documents which I have read whole books on. The prose is National Geographic prose, and I could not get too caught up by the book, though some of the entries are of highly interesting or disturbing documents. ( )

However important the issues, the documents themselves were usually not that interesting or important - or at least not the parts that are shown. I also found the constant jumping around in history to be difficult to follow. Documents closely related are in different chapters. ( )

Mr. Allen has written an interesting book. He briefly discusses 50 of the most important/prominent espionage stories in history. The only issue I have with the book is the discussion of each story often seemed too brief. Most sections only contained three or four pages, giving only the briefest glimpse of the incident. In spite of this, the book works well as an introduction to espionage.

The title is somewhat misleading, while the book attaches some type of document to each of the 50 incidents, in many of the cases the document is only of minor importance. Additionally several of the incidents involve documents that are not what the average person would consider “declassified”. ( )