The Books Briefing: Annette Gordon-Reed, Beverly Gage

Americans are used to studying historical past by the tales of nice males. Think of Thomas Jefferson: He drafted the Declaration of Independence; he was the primary secretary of state and our third president; he even died, poetically, on the Fourth of July. Though he’s incessantly mentioned alongside different Founding Fathers, within the public consciousness, Jefferson stands on his personal, like a titan. But the historian Annette Gordon-Reed, in her Pulitzer Prize–successful The Hemingses of Monticello, reminds us that Jefferson’s life was intimately linked with these of the Hemingses, a household he enslaved. His story is inextricable from theirs, Hamilton Cain writes.

Gordon-Reed punctures “great man”–fashion historical past by reminding readers that nobody, not even Jefferson, is an island, and by insisting on the Hemingses’ inclusion in narratives of the American previous. Other writers and students dismiss our tendency to middle highly effective males in numerous methods. In G-Man, Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, the person remembered as a singular, influential determine who remade the FBI in his personal picture seems “more team player than solo villain,” Jack Goldsmith writes. The issues with making an individual right into a fantasy are much more apparent when the important thing gamers are all nonetheless residing. Both Michael Cohen’s and Mike Pence’s memoirs have the identical situation: Cohen’s tone is “self-exonerating and accusatory,” Laura Kipnis writes, and Tim Alberta explains that Pence refuses to “reflect meaningfully” on the Trump administration. Each needs to characterize his position throughout these years as pivotal—whereas eschewing their very own accountability, and distancing themselves from the previous president.

Of course, people can matter rather a lot to the course of historical past—Maria Ressa, a co-founder of the information outlet Rappler within the Philippines, received the Nobel Peace Prize for standing as much as President Rodrigo Duterte’s regime. And she admits that the struggle towards encroaching fascism would require “person-to-person” efforts. But her guide How to Stand Up to a Dictator doesn’t recommend that anybody ought to go it alone. Instead, she writes, it can take the trouble of “you and me and everyone you know” to alter the long run.

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“Gordon-Reed layers her book with meticulous research and revelatory anecdotes, exposing how Jefferson’s life is inextricable from the Hemingses’ just as America’s history is inextricable from slavery.”

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How J. Edgar Hoover went from hero to villain

“[Gage] also shows that the prevailing image of Hoover as a ‘one-dimensional tyrant and backroom schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission’ is a distortion. Hoover emerges instead as a still-flawed figure, yet more team player than solo villain. He understood that his success depended on public approval, which he was adept at building. Just as crucial was high-level support for his actions (covert as well as overt), under liberal and conservative administrations alike, which he worked assiduously to secure. Hoover’s pragmatism helped curb, at various junctures, his dogmatism and extremist tactics.”

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America’s mediocre hero

“Reading [Cohen’s] two memoirs back to back presented certain quandaries: Although they cover much of the same ground, something in Cohen radically shifted between them. In the second go-around, he seems to have come undone, and is by turns scattershot and floundering. No longer a witness to history and to [Donald] Trump’s political self-invention, he has been fractured by history, though perhaps in illuminating ways.”

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Mike Pence refuses to attach the dots

“And yet, the book is also singularly frustrating, tortured in its appraisal of so many history-making moments and reluctant to reflect meaningfully on the author’s view of them.”

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How to struggle fascism earlier than it’s too late

“World War III won’t just be a conventional war. The fight for democracy requires a person-to-person defense of our democracies. Microtargeting means that this is hand-to-hand combat for all of us on social media. This is us—you and me and everyone you know—resisting dictatorship through our values not only in the public sphere but in our daily lives. That begins with trust.”