Painstakingly detailed, to a fault. This book needed to narrow in the scope and cut out unnecessary details. Yes, by the end, it makes sense why Maddow chose to include the details she included, but the payoff wasn't worth the trudge through incessant lists of numbers and personal details of people involved.

Also, I'm just not a fan of Rachel Maddow's tone - I'm okay with sardonic humor and sarcastic comments and have even read other nonfiction books that use this writing style that I absolutely loved, but the way Maddow chose to write heavily shows her biases and at times comes across as almost? infantilizing? the people involved. I think this was made worse because I listened to the audiobook and found Maddow's narration to be grating.

In the end, I can say I learned a lot, but the quality of information I learned seems to be rather low. By the time we got to the important part (how US oil execs teamed up with Russia to create an uber-powerful industry that controls the world), my brain was so full of fluff that I didn't even care to really dig in and digest the material. 

The latter half of the book is still a worthwhile read, and I personally found it interesting to understand the things that happened in my adolescence before I was politically active - Edward Snowden, Guccifer, tension between Russia and Ukraine, etc.