Friday's Forgotten Books, Coffee Table Edition

For Friday's Forgotten Books this week, Patti Abbott solicited coffee table suggestions. Although having a book published in 2008 doesn't make it necessarily appropriate for a "forgotten" category, many people probably aren't aware of this one, unless you've come across it at your local library.

The FBI: A Centennial History, 1908-2008, is published by the U.S. Department of Justice, so you can rightly suspect it won't include Bureau controversies, scandals or missteps. But it does trace the agency's evolution from a makeshift band of 34 investigators to a full-fledged national security and intelligence agency with 30,000 special agents (at least 52 of whom have been killed in the line of duty).

There are overviews of the gangster years, World War II, the Cold War, espionage and terrorism, and synopses and 300 photos (some not previously shown to the public) from over 40 of the Bureau's best-known cases. You can also print a PDF of the book, and then, I suppose, put your laser-paper copy on your coffee table. If you'd prefer the glossy version, order it from the GAO office.