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“Important and
disturbing…Wisely concentrating on the FBIs secret intelligence operations,
Weiner lays bare a record of embarrassing, even stunning failure, in which the
bureau’s lawlessness was matched only by its incompetence…Weiner…has done
prodigious research, yet tells this depressing story with all the verve and
coherence of a good spy thriller.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“What makes Enemies
so compelling is that it draws heavily on previously unavailable intelligence
files…Weiner uses them, and previously unheard oral histories, to set the record
straight about the bureau’s conduct both in times of war and in times of peace…Enemies
is more than a definitive history of the FBI. Weiner…is really writing about
the basic tension between civil liberties and national security in this country.”
— Washington Post
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“Fast-paced,
fair-minded, and fascinating, Tim Weiner’s Enemies
turns the long history of the FBI into a story that is as compelling, and
important, as today’s headlines.”
— Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath
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“Absorbing…A sweeping narrative that is all the more entertaining
because it is so redolent with screw-ups and scandals.”
— Los Angeles Times
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“Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner has written a riveting inside
account of the FBI’s secret machinations that goes so deep into the Bureau’s skullduggery,
readers will feel they are tapping the phones along with J. Edgar Hoover. This
is a book that every American who cares about civil liberties should read.”
— Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side
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“Terrifically
entertaining.”
— Boston Sunday Globe
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“A history that moves
at the pace of a James Ellroy novel. But Weiner’s truth is wilder even than Ellroy’s
fiction…He offers no opinions, just facts.”
— Spectator
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“Mr. Weiner’s work is
grounded in assiduous research and is the more compelling for it…A compendium
of juicy spy stories…Enemies is an exhaustive
chronicle and a very good read.”
— Wall Street Journal
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“A fascinating tale
of the bureau’s successes and failures…An important and biting inquiry into an
agency that protects Americans in a dangerous world while straining against the
limitations we rightly impose on it.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
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“Weiner has mastered
the craft of the institutional history as well as any journalist, historian, or
political scientist working in the English language.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
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“A thrilling
experience and a superb book.”
— Time Out
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“Drawing on newly
declassified documents, this outstanding history lays bare almost all we can
reasonably expect to know about the FBI…As illuminating about Washington politics
as it is about the dark world of espionage and counterintelligence operations.”
— Sunday Times (London)
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“An important,
judicious account of the tension between national security and civil liberties.”
— Publishers Weekly
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“Drawing on thousands
of pages of recently declassified documents and oral histories, Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Award winner Weiner…delivers an authoritative and often
frightening history of what has been, in effect, America’s secret police…A
sober, monumental and unflinchingly critical account of a problematic
institution.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“Enemies is a research masterpiece. Picking through seventy thousand
newly declassified documents and using on-the-record interviews, Weiner reveals
startling new truths and debunks nagging old myths about the FBI. Enemies reads like a thriller, but don’t
let the heart-pumping prose fool you. Weiner has written a scholarly tour de
force that will be an instant classic for any serious student of American
national security.”
— Amy B. Zegart, PhD, author of Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Orgins of 9/11
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“Tim Weiner’s Enemies is the most comprehensive
history of the FBI as an intelligence agency we have ever had. Basing his text
on extensive research in previously unavailable materials, Weiner gives us a
fresh way to think about J. Edgar Hoover, the many presidents he worked with,
and the FBI as a national security agency.”
— Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963