A welcome reevaluation of a law enforcement legend, now much scorned, who so often operated above the law.
Doorstop biography of J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), who exercised outsize power for half a century.
As Yale historian Gage writes in this overlong but rich account, Hoover believed that the “thoroughly American” FBI honored the federal government’s progressive duty to make life better for “real” Americans while snipping leftist political thorns and suppressing minorities. Largely sidestepping the longtime speculations about Hoover’s sexual preferences, the author also notes that, while many writers have long thought that Hoover amassed power by blackmailing presidents and attorneys general, he stayed at the helm of the FBI because important people throughout the federal government wanted him there. One ally was Richard Nixon, and Gage breaks news by showing that although the FBI is supposed to be politically neutral, Hoover fed Nixon information about the Kennedy campaign during the presidential race. Nixon honored the debt by not firing Hoover, as much as he wanted to, as Watergate—whose exposure owed much to internal dissensions within the bureau—began to take bring down his presidency. When writing of a younger, more idealistic Hoover, Gage acknowledges his intellect and organizational skills—even as a teenager, he was keeping dossiers on everyone imaginable—while also noting that Hoover was committed to a racist fraternity that would influence his entire career path. “Taught as a young man to regard segregation as a bedrock of the social order,” writes the author, “he did not simply abandon those ideas when the Supreme Court declared otherwise.” His hatred of Martin Luther King Jr., however, seems to have been based less on race than on his conviction that King was a communist, the worst thing anyone could be in Hoover’s eyes. Gage closes by concluding that for all Hoover’s flaws and legally questionable programs, making him a scapegoat exonerates too many other guilty parties: “His guilt restores everyone else’s innocence.”
A welcome reevaluation of a law enforcement legend, now much scorned, who so often operated above the law.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-670-02537-4
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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