After reading such masterpiece biographies as Caro on Moses or Kinross on Ataturk, Whyte on Hoover comes across as a little light, a little bland, if well-written - but taken on its own merits, I will say that it has fascinating implications regarding the differences between FDR and Hoover, and what could have been.
This historical treatise has a lot of notoriety but I found it unnecessarily dense, and ultimately flawed, in that its focus on states and state power ignores a related discussion of capitalist power, such that altho there is a useful perspective to glean here about how a drive for social legibility can transform a society, I wouldn't recommend the book overall.
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