I don’t read a lot of memoirs. None, really. I can get behind a good biography, and maybe even an autobiography, sometimes. But the idea of slogging through a few hundred pages of the self-important reminisces of someone gazing through the lens of their own nostalgia appeals to me about as much as being FedExed the plates from whatever they ate for dinner last night. But when I heard famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had published such a book, my curiosity got the better of me and I picked up a copy. For the most part, it was worth it.

The book, Permanent Record, doesn’t entirely avoid the foibles I attribute to your average, banal memoir. The chapters describing Snowden’s life leading up to his involvement in the intelligence community are a narrative that would make Forrest Gump proud. It seems his entire young life was a chain of delightful coincidences leading up to the one event that made him famous: Can you believe it? If he wasn’t obsessed with online video games as a kid, he might never have used a computer to download thousands of classified documents from the NSA and flee to Russia after disclosing them to the news media.

And then there are the usual specious analogies—er, by which I mean the delicious ironies of life, which give memoirs their rich flavor. “Coming from a Coast Guard family,” Snowden writes, “I’ve always been fascinated by how much of the English language of disclosure”—by which he means spilling secrets—“has a nautical undercurrent.”

He goes on: “Organizations, like ships, sprang leaks,” he explains—ignoring the fact that so do buckets. “When steam replaced wind for propulsion, whistles were blown at sea to signal intentions and emergencies,” he adds. But of course, the police blew whistles back then, too. These days you mostly hear them on basketball courts. But if the only tool you have is the Coast Guard, I guess, every problem starts to look like a sea rescue.

Aside: I mean, seriously, what’s next? Is he going to point out that there are network ports but no network starboards, and that when you’re facing the bow of the ship, the port side is to your left, and that the English word “left” is derived from the Old English root “lyft-“ meaning “weak or useless”? And that the Latin word for left, “sinister,” meant “unlucky”? Smoke enough crystal meth and you could spend all day spinning nonsense like this. Yet this is the type of treacle that sells memoirs.

Anyway, nitpicks aside, the book is pretty good. Even in the boring parts, where he’s describing his middle-class upbringing, it was interesting to learn the climate in Washington when he joined the intelligence community, post 9/11. Normally, he explains, he would have at least needed a college degree; but these were not normal times. As a tech guy who has mostly gotten away with not having a college degree myself, I can relate. Still, it makes you wonder what norms and policies are being set aside under the current administration.

It was also interesting to learn that for most of his career working for three-letter agencies, he was ostensibly an employee of Texas-based computing giant Dell—although the sole customer that concerned him at any given time was, for example, the CIA. (Full disclosure: The company I work for as of this writing is majority-owned by Dell.)

Another enlightening moment: Snowden writes, “I was told that it was in fact slightly better to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas the enemy is unlikely to share its prize even with its allies.”

That last disclosure struck a chord with me. I finished Snowden’s book this morning, just hours after the Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump had informed Russia about a planned raid to kill ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before notifying Congressional leadership, at a time when the House of Representatives largely opposes his administration’s policies.

Politics and spycraft aside, the technical aspects of the book are sound. Snowden does an admirable job of explaining such things as encryption, backdoors, and other aspects of online security in a way that is consumable by general audiences, even while mentioning by name some of the specific software involved, presumably to let guys like me know he’s not bullshitting. I can tell his knowledge is far deeper than he’s letting on; his derision and contempt of being assigned the role of Microsoft SharePoint admin, for example, fairly oozes off the page. But this is not a book for tech geeks, no doubt because if it was, he’d largely be preaching to the choir. This is a book aimed squarely at Joe and Jane American, and by extension, those citizens of the world who are within the USA’s reach. (Spoilers: That’s all of them.)

Long story short: You don’t need to know anything about computer systems to read this book.

So is this a book that every American should read, as has been said? I don’t know. If you know absolutely nothing about Snowden’s story, this is a worthwhile read—provided, of course, that you can stomach memoirs. Myself, back when I was a reporter for The Register, I was tasked to write Snowden stories pretty regularly during the exciting moments of his saga. Thus, very little of this book came as a surprise to me. I can affirm, however, that absolutely nothing he says in these pages seems exaggerated in any way, or contradicts what I think I already know. What the guy says happened, happened.

To his credit, Snowden reminds us that he wiped his hard drives before fleeing his Hong Kong hotel room, destroying all of his own copies of the documents he turned over to reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. He can no longer access these documents even if he wanted to—or at least, no more easily than anyone else could. His role in the saga of the fight against online surveillance exists largely in the past. Whatever comes next belongs to someone else.

Snowden’s life today seems to revolve mostly around speaking gigs and other media opportunities, of which this book is another. Other than that, in another syrupy, memoir-esque chapter, he informs us that he lives a humble life in Russia and that his longtime girlfriend managed to immigrate to Russia and they are now married. If you like that type of happy ending to your deeply troubling political discourse, this book delivers.

P.S. Incidentally, the U.S. government is currently pressing the courts to seek a summary judgment against further publication of this book, because by not having it vetted by the CIA, Snowden allegedly violated his nondisclosure agreement with the agency. Snowden doesn’t actually dispute this claim, and the very idea that he’d knock on the front door of the people who presumably want to throw him in prison for the rest of his life is patently absurd. Still, you might want to pick up your copy sooner, rather than later.