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As one reads through Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, you can’t escape the feeling that it was written as an educational companion piece for the first Black Ops game. While it wasn’t (one can dream, right?), Weiner’s book definitely explores “the history you know” –- between the pages, you can almost watch the first Black Ops game unfold, buried somewhere within a “shadowy world of plausible deniability.”

Given last Friday’s post pertaining to the anniversary of President Eisenhower’s farewell address, we felt that today’s #ReadingList feature was a poignant one. It turns out that the name of the book pays homage to an Eisenhower quote: “You (Dulles) have handed me an eight-year defeat, and I will hand on to my successor, John F. Kennedy, a legacy of ashes.”

While some take issue with Weiner’s account of the agency’s history, the reality remains that this is a seminal work and a must-read –- and one that brings a deeper level of context to Black Ops 1’s fiction.