Thornton speaks the way Seurat painted; a point here, a point there and voilà an image emerges; and that image is invariably insightful. To try to bang his stream (nay torrent!)-of-consciousness into an unbroken paragraph seems a task worthy of Hercules, let alone trying to weave it together into a book.
First, let me say this is a successful book. Second, let me ask "who the heck edited it?" Its replete with examples like: "known [by it's acronym] FOQA for Flight Quality and Operations Assurance" which are forgivable when they fall from the pen of an author, but which smack of negligent editing when they make it to print.
Though burdened both by the task of bottling Thornton's hurricane and by woeful editing, the book is an effective clarion call to "business" to get off of its collective empirical keister and really analyze the data that surrounds it. The book is short on falsifiability and long on anecdote; but then its not the bugler's job to justify Reveille, he just awakens the army.
