What to Read Next: March 7, 2025
Issue #368, featuring a masterclass in biography
Happy Friday readers,
After a cold February for much of the country, March is definitely feeling a bit springier. Even if the world around us is in chaos, it always helps to take a walk outside. The birds are migrating (we’ve enjoyed seeing hooded mergansers and northern shovelers around here), some green is popping up out of the ground, and even though we certainly still have a few spring snowstorms ahead, you can feel nature rejuvenating.
Here’s what is on tap this week:
A review of Beverly Gage’s incredible biography of J. Edgar Hoover
The vulnerabilities of crypto investing
March releases I’m looking forward to
5 Things: Links and Opinions
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G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
I’ve read plenty of 20th-century American history that has featured J. Edgar Hoover — the (in)famous long-time director of the FBI — as an ancillary character. But reading a long, Pulitzer-winning biography centered entirely on this enigmatic and controversial figure gave me a new appreciation for how unelected power can be wielded.
Beverly Gage beautifully wrote and structured this book to both inform and engage the reader — those two things certainly do not always go hand in hand.
Gage masterfully covered every aspect of life: his childhood in Washington DC, his rocky start at the nascent FBI, his intimate relationship with Clyde Tolson, his absolute rule over the FBI when he became director, and most interestingly to me, Hoover’s long-covered-up slide into spying on American citizens like Martin Luther King, Jr.
Plus, as the subtitle alludes to, the book is really a microcosm of American history in the middle decades of the 20th century. Hoover’s life was so wrapped up in what was happening in America at large that the two are almost impossible to separate.
In many ways, G-Man reminded me of Robert Caro’s legendary 1974 book, The Power Broker. Robert Moses held power for decades, in an unelected position, until some of his more unsavory practices came to light. J. Edgar Hoover’s career was quite similar to that, and like Moses, his reputation continues to suffer in the modern day.
Overall, Beverly Gage’s G-Man is exactly what I’m looking for in a biography. I don’t just want facts — I want an engaging narrative that balances the necessary and most interesting information, with plenty of context and discussion about lasting legacies and effects. This book does require a little bit of reading endurance, but I always looked forward to picking it back up again. (Reading it on a Kindle sure helped.) If you’re at all interested in big books about American history, this one is in the can’t-miss category.