G-Man
J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2023
Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
Winner of the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy
Winner of the American History Book Prize
Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Longlisted for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction
When he became director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater into a modern machine. He stayed in power for decades, and created a personal fiefdom unrivalled in US history.
In this masterful, multi-award-winning biography, Beverley Gage explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career. In Gage’s portrait, Hoover was a man admired by millions, but was also a formidable public figure who intimidated his enemies, excluded minorities from his great American project and created the foundations of the US far right.
G-Man is a dramatic portrait of one of America’s most influential – and controversial – public figures. It is also an engrossing story of the making of modern America.
'Revelatory' New York Times
'Astonishing' The New Yorker
'Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work' The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this captivating biography, J. Edgar Hoover's tenure as FBI director from 1924 to 1972 reveals "what Americans valued and fought over during those years, what we tolerated and what we refused to see." Yale historian Gage (The Day Wall Street Exploded) meticulously tracks the highs and lows of Hoover's career, including the Palmer raids of 1919–1920, the killing of gangster John Dillinger in 1934, the Kennedy assassination, and counterintelligence operations against the antiwar movement in the 1960s and '70s. Special attention is paid to Hoover's "extended campaign of vilification and harassment" against Martin Luther King Jr., which had some basis in anti-Communist paranoia, Gage notes, but mostly came from "the racism that often made see calls for justice as a threat to national security." Gage also sheds valuable light on Hoover's experience of his "gentle" father's depression; his college membership in a Southern fraternity "founded in 1865 to preserve the cause of the white South," whose members Hoover frequently recruited into the FBI; and his intimate relationship with his second-in-command, Clyde Tolson. Throughout, Gage persuasively explains how Hoover went from a nationally popular figure to becoming "a standard-bearer less for the unbounded promise of federal power than for its dangers." Nuanced, incisive, and exhaustive, this is the definitive portrait of one of 20th-century America's most consequential figures.
