Richard Hack

Very very detailed biography. Starts with his death and the mysteries that surrounded it. If you liked the movie The Aviator this might be a good book for you. It fills in a lot of the blanks and some of the strange behaviors exhibited in that movie. Follows his life from when he was a sickly child. Moving around and around, losing his mother and then his father. His public persona as a ladies man, generally with young girls. Then his deterioration into different manias, locking himself away from the outside world for days to weeks to months on end. Again very detailed but after a while it just turns tedious.… (mere)

There are about as many myths about J. Edgar Hoover as there are truths. While head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1935 to 1972, there were stories of homosexual trysts with his assistant director Clyde Tolson and that he routinely wore women’s clothing. While these are rumors just the same, they linger in the national psyche. Richard Hack’s Puppetmaster tries to get a more complete picture of the man behind one of the nation’s largest investigative groups.

While most of the information presented in Puppetmaster is good and interesting, the writing is simple and clunky. Hack goes off on too many tangents and includes too many minors details for the history to matter. To be fair, he has gathered a great deal of information about the life of J. Edgar Hoover and how he came to lead the nation’s police force for the better part of five decades. He dispels many of the popular rumors as meager and unsubstantiated, and tries to get to the meat of the story. Unfortunately, he misses the mark. This is a good starter biography, but I’m sure there are other better ones out there.… (mere)