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Dec 11, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Beverly Gage
Since President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention of appointing his political loyalist Kash Patel as the director of the F.B.I., critics have warned that we’re heading back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. The F.B.I. should be so lucky. Hoover, for all his many faults and abuses of power, was nevertheless an institution builder; he believed in the F.B.I.’s nonpartisan independence.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Beverly Gage
People often have mixed feelings about their birthdays, especially as they age. Countries can experience that too. For better or worse, America is due for a big birthday party: July 4, 2026, will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—our national semiquincentennial, in the awkward Latinate construction, or “semiquin” for short. In an ideal world, it would be a moment of commemoration and celebration as well as a chance to reflect on national history.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
fivebooks.com | Julian Jackson |Halik Kochanski |Tania Branigan |Beverly Gage
France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain 🏆 Winner of the 2024 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for nonfiction Read expert recommendations “Pétain had been the hero of Verdun, a great figure, but he was being tried for treason for signing the armistice with the Nazi regime and being the leader of the Vichy regime in France. He was on trial for his life, accused of collusion with Nazi Germany, and the verdict wasn’t much in doubt. It’s about more than the fate of a particular person—it’s a...
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Dec 30, 2023 | 
jacobin.com | Beverly Gage
Interview by Micah Uetricht J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, may have had a greater impact on the course of American history than any other unelected public official.
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Dec 13, 2023 | 
fivebooks.com | Halik Kochanski |Tania Branigan |Beverly Gage |Nandini Das
“It’s comprehensive, and that’s very important because a problem with history writing in general, but particularly with resistance, is that it tends to be written from a nation-centric point of view…But this was a pan-European movement and what she does really well is to identify first of all the commonalities. In all of these countries, when you look at underground resistance movements, similar things happened.
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Nov 11, 2023 | 
shepherd.com | David Grann |Beverly Gage |Ben Macintyre |Dean Jobb
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission. Myfavorite read in 2023…Mutiny on the Bounty meets Lord of the Flies in this harrowing tale of mutiny, treachery, and survival. David Grann, bestselling author andstaff writer for The New Yorker, delivers a gripping, vivid, can’t-put-it-down read.
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Aug 26, 2023 | 
gvnews.com | Anthony Marra |Lauren Willig |Beverly Gage |Kendra Bergman
“Mercury Pictures Presents”By Anthony MarraPenguin Random House416 PagesAnthony Marra’s “Mercury Pictures Presents” is a tale of Hollywood during World War II. Woven into those peculiar times are the stories of several families of émigrés who escaped fascism and Nazism and made their way to Hollywood. They were forbidden from traveling more than a few miles and could not appear to be at all supportive of the countries they left.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
lrb.co.uk | Beverly Gage |Deborah Friedell
Seventy years ago, Gallup asked Americans for their opinion of J. Edgar Hoover. Only 2 per cent expressed strong disapproval. It was a result, the pollsters claimed, ‘virtually without parallel in surveys that have dealt with men in public life’. For decades, Hoover could luxuriate in the knowledge that he was, quite possibly, the most admired man in the country – or at least in the District of Columbia, which to him usually amounted to the same thing.
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Mar 4, 2023 | 
thenation.com | Beverly Gage |Lerone A. Martin |Adam Hochschild |Cole Stangler
This article appears in the March 20/27, 2023 issue. J. Edgar Hoover, we’ve always assumed, became the most powerful unelected American of his time because he had the goods on everybody: the mistresses, financial shenanigans, and underworld connections of presidents who might fire him and legislators who might investigate him. Two new books about the longtime FBI chief make you realize that there was something else as well.
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Mar 1, 2023 | 
literaryreview.co.uk | Beverly Gage
In his near half-century as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J Edgar Hoover made the organisation the domestic anchor of American global power, synchronising the crusades against fascism and communism abroad with the preservation of order and hierarchy at home. Beverly Gage, in the first biography of Hoover in nearly three decades, has tapped into a vast quantity of FBI files and personal papers to produce a vivid study of a man, an institution and a nation.
