G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century - Beverly Gage Audiobook

Written by Beverly Gage
Read by Gabra Zackman
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape
Awards: National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize
Release date: November 22, 2022
Duration: 36:54:17

A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today’s conservative political landscape.

We remember him as a bulldog—squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls—but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people—many of them communists or racial minorities or both— did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history.

Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission.

As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon. Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party.

“The female perspective of the author and the female voice of narrator Gabra Zackman are especially effective in discussing one of this past century’s most admired male prototypes, the FBI G-man, and the five-decade reign of its controversial director, J. Edgar Hoover. A sensitive and experienced narrator, Zackman keeps a steady pace through the 36+ hours of an often-astonishing reexamination of legends and events. The narrative is crowded with names and frequently weighed down with summary and overview, but its burdens are lightened by Zackman’s fine pacing and focused delivery. Whether the audiobook is presenting life in sleepy Washington a century ago or a fresh spin on the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, the career of J. Edgar Hoover has never been so thoroughly dissected, or its mysteries so fully unraveled.”… AudioFile 2022

The book is a massive 37hours long broken into four sections with 58 chapters. I put it into the sections that range from 5 to 9hrs each. Each section is a book in it’s self focusing on different eras.