(Note: This show first aired back in December.) Our guest is Beverly Gage, a professor of 20th-century American history at Yale. She joins us to talk about her widely celebrated biography of J. Edgar Hoover, which has just been published and is already a "top book of 2022" according to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. It's a sweeping new volume that, per the author and historian Jon Meacham, is a "monumental work about power, responsibility, and democracy itself. With deep research, an engaging voice, and penetrating insights, Gage has crafted a portrait of a man and a country in all its complexity and contradiction. To understand who we are, Gage argues, we need to understand the rise and reign of J. Edgar Hoover. And this book is now an indispensable element in the unending work of grasping the nature of our flawed nation."
"J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century" (Encore)
