A riveting, damning indictment of the FBI’s illegal activities under its founding director.
A lawyer explores a web of illegal FBI activities in the 1960s and the downfall of a Supreme Court justice in this nonfiction work.
“FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was a self-appointed moral arbiter,” writes author Charns in the book’s opening chapter. For almost half a century, Hoover obsessively amassed intimate details of the private sex lives of public figures through informers, “warrantless burglaries,”and illegal wiretaps and bugs. Once allegations of sexual indiscretions made their way to his desk, Hoover would often blackmail his victims to further consolidate his power. Per Charns’ detailed and convincing narrative, one of the most high-ranking victims of Hoover’s machinations was Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. Based on FBI files Charns obtained through a lengthy, litigious Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI, the author details how Hoover leveraged the 1960s’ rampant homophobia against Fortas, who became one of the FBI’s most high-level informants. While the villain of this story is Hoover, the book highlights how Fortas himself committed a host of ethical violations that eventually led to his resignation, tainting his progressive legacy as an advocate for racial minorities, children’s rights, and freedom of speech. As gripping as the book’s historical narrative is—detailing a seedy underworld of sex, blackmail, and manipulation at the highest levels of power in Washington, D.C.—Charns also compellingly chronicles his own personal battle with the FBI to obtain FOIA documents and offers an astute commentary on the ethics of using FBI files in publicized research. The author, an attorney, ably guides readers through a myriad of legal complexities regarding illicit FBI activities and subsequent coverups. At just over 100 pages, this is an accessible book geared toward the general public. The text includes scholarly endnotes that rely heavily on FOIA requested government documents. The book concludes with an appendix that features scans of many of these documents, which accentuate the author’s call for transparency.
A riveting, damning indictment of the FBI’s illegal activities under its founding director.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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