JasonKoivu

What was the deal with that interminable introduction?! It went on forever and yet went nowhere. Get by that and you're in for a treat!

Mark "Deep Throat" Felt, the man who made it possible for Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein to discover the truth behind Watergate, has written a fairly captivating memoir in A G-Man's Life.

Felt was an FBI agent from the earlier days of the bureau who rose up through the ranks to become one of its top officials. Many of the FBI stories he relates are nothing earth-shatteringly revealing. One senses that although Felt is retired from the FBI, he still would not give up its secrets without damn good reason, at least not to regular citizens like you and me. So what we get are very entertaining (though basically feel-good) stories about cases Felt was assigned to. Much of the book is devoted to his hero J. Edgar Hoover, the founding father of the FBI, a man Felt admired almost sycophantically. Almost, I say, because it's apparent Felt was his own man and viewed Hoover as his boss and not an entirely infallible one.

While the FBI cases were entertaining, what I liked was seeing how his career affected his personal life. How does such a need for secrecy affect a family? Clearly it's not an easy life for the agent, nor their loved ones. Imagine how difficult it must have been for the man who - at the time - was seen by some as a betrayer of the FBI and his own country's president.

Those readers who make it their business to snoop into all this spy/spook/secret agent stuff probably won't find anything in here they don't already know, but for the rest of us Felt offers up a few eye-openers making A G-Man's Life well worth the reading...just skip over that introduction. Trust me, you won't miss a thing.