The award-winning, bestselling biography that traces Lyndon Johnson's rise tonational prominence.
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Dec 16, 2009
Blanca
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I finished the first installment of the complete history of LBJ's political career just as I began working at the Texas Legislature. Lots of people think LBJ was a mean ole' SOB, but he was also enigmatic, visionary and had a great understanding of how to bust some balls for the good of the people. Caro has been banned from the LBJ Museum at UT-Austin because he doesn't portray LBJ as a warm and fuzzy guy. Despite the accounts of infidelty, great ego and down-right intimidating scariness, LBJ
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Jan 08, 2009
Roger
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The early years of LBJ in great detail. The author gives you an understanding of how this complex man who become President was molded and what drove him to reach for great heights. Also gives you an understanding on how his formative years eventually lead to a white Southern politician to push for civil rights legislation in 1964. A story of how a poor young man from the Hill County of Texas was able to achieve national power by age 31 and his heartbreaking loss of his first race for the Senat
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Sep 15, 2011
Daniel
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As someone who rarely reads non-fiction, and has little interest in the intricacies of American politics, I was somewhat surprised, when I got through the first hundred or so pages, to find myself loving Caro's account of the early life and political career of LBJ. I picked up the book for two reasons. Number one: I've always been fascinated by the Vietnam conflict and Johnson played a significant role in turning Vietnam into the fiasco that it eventually became. My second reason, admittedly
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Feb 22, 2011
Joe
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And you thought Halliburton was a GW Bush, thing. My friends, think again. It all goes back, way back to the 1930s, to a little outfit out of Houston called Brown and Root. Mr. Brown just wanted to build things, big things like dams, Air Bases, and stuff. He really, really had a thing for pouring concrete. LBJ just wanted to run things, big things like the whole country and probably the world, and possibly the known universe. He really, really had a thing for bossing people around, not to mentio
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May 25, 2009
Frank
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For years I've shoved Caro's The Power Broker into people's hands like I got commission for it, like I was some kind of cheap pusher ("Just try it..."). It's the greatest nonfiction book I've ever read, hands down, bar none, no question. But the only other thing Caro ever wrote was this four volume (fourth volume still forthcoming, and he'll probably manage to split it up and turn it into two more door-stopping volumes) biography of Lyndon Johnson, and I knew there was no way I cared e
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Apr 13, 2009
Murray
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This is considered to be one of the greatest biographies of all time. Caro is still, as far as I am aware, working on the next (final) volume of his brilliant study of LBJ. The detail is remarkable, and he gradually brings into focus this gangly, bullying, charismatic man. Here is a politician who was being careful even during schooldays, not to take a position that might work against him in later years. he had enormous charm and that chameleon quality that made his political mentors believe he
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Nov 12, 2009
Bill
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Like Caro's previous/first book The Power Broker, The Path to Power is as much a perspective on the America of the time as it is a biography of an individual. The volume contains some beautifully-written vignettes on the settlement of the Texas Hill Country, what daily life was like for the women there, a quick bio on Sam Rayburn, etc. Caro's writing again raises history to the level of literature.
Lyndon Johnson emerges as a fascinatingly flawed and gifted personality, whose vast a More...
Lyndon Johnson emerges as a fascinatingly flawed and gifted personality, whose vast a More...
Feb 19, 2011
Howard
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The first of a projected four-volume biography/history of Lyndon Baines Johnson by Robert Caro (the first three are currently in print). Extraordinary is the best word for this biography. Charts Johnson's roots in the Hill Country of Texas and his often unscrupulous rise to political prominence in the '30s and '40s. Caro paints a portrait of a troubled, insecure, petty manipulator with a first-rate poltical intelligence who cut an unequalled swath across the 20th Century's political landscape as
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Jun 06, 2009
Frank
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Reading this I couldn't help but think about that part in the Big Lebowski where Maude refers the Dude to a doctor, saying, "He's a good man, and thorough." So is Robert Caro.
Caro is an excellent biographer. The portrait he paints of LBJ feels very truthful and clear. He approaches it like a good journalist. The interviews that set him off to search for the true story -- as discussed in the afterward -- paint Caro as the real hero of this tome.
Learning about t More...
Caro is an excellent biographer. The portrait he paints of LBJ feels very truthful and clear. He approaches it like a good journalist. The interviews that set him off to search for the true story -- as discussed in the afterward -- paint Caro as the real hero of this tome.
Learning about t More...
Jan 01, 2010
Gina
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Only a little interested in LBJ, I felt I needed to learn more about him to be a more effective teacher of 20th century Texas history. Little did I know what gift I was giving myself. I started Caro's trilogy with this, the first in the series. I definitely learned about LBJ's early life and beginning in politics, but I also learned about the life and extreme hardships of Central Texas people in the early and mid twentieth century. Leaders like Sam Rayburn, who had just been a name on a page
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Mar 28, 2011
Dan
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Robert Caro is just brilliant at explaining why politicians did the things they did (see also The Power Broker). This is far more than a biography of LBJ, though it is that, it's a deeply researched and highly detailed history of the places and times that shaped President Johnson. It covers subjects as diverse as the treacherous nature of the soil in Texas' hill country, backroom legislative maneuvering in the New Deal Congresses, the unending toil that farmers and their wives had to endure pr
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May 06, 2010
Greg
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Oh, what a wonderful book! Politics! History! Opportunism! Though this is part one in what is now a three-part series, one can certainly make fair judgment of Lyndon Baines Johnson and his character. If anything, his actions confirm for me something I deeply believe but sometimes find difficult to maintain: the fact that politicians are, in general, egocentric people who are human beings in every way, no matter their accomplishments. None is worthy of idolization, especially in life. This
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Dec 01, 2008
Melissa
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For years, I've been told I _must_ read this book. I had always hesitated because it was gigantic. I chose it as a plane book for a trip in October and finished it this past weekend--just over a month.
First, everyone was right. It is well worth reading, even though reading it is a bit of a commitment. I didn't just learn about LBJ--I learned about Texas in the early 20th century. There is a richness and depth to this book that few biographies or histories have. Parts of it are simply More...
First, everyone was right. It is well worth reading, even though reading it is a bit of a commitment. I didn't just learn about LBJ--I learned about Texas in the early 20th century. There is a richness and depth to this book that few biographies or histories have. Parts of it are simply More...
Mar 07, 2009
James
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Victory!! There is a set of books which I have had stacked next to my bed -- either in an actual stack, or more recently, in a special bookcase -- for years. These are the books that I haven't been able to finish. This book? I'm pretty sure I picked it up at a going-away party a decade ago. Yeesh. Anyway, it took me 9 years to read the first three chapters, another year to get up to chapter 5, and I finished the rest off in a month. Which is to say, the pace, it picks up. And man, is LBJ a piece
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Dec 02, 2010
Evan
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I am hesitant to rate or review this book before I read the whole series. But this book is a well researched and engrossing read. At first glance, Caro's choice of researching Lyndon Johnson for 30+ years was a bit incongruous with his previous biography of Robert Moses. Moses, an upper-class life-long bureaucrat, graduated from Yale, who very selectively chose mentors and friends, and started his professional career as a starry-eyed idealist; Johnson, a farm boy turned life-long politician from
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Jun 30, 2010
Sarita
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Caro's look at Johnson's formative years is nothing short revelatory . . . and not only on the subject of Johnson's personal history. Caro's portrait of the lives of dirt-poor Hill Country farmers during the years between Texas's settlement and rural electrification is as vivid as it is intimate. The contributions of his wife Ina through her interviews with rural farmers' wives brings a new clarity and dimension to a time in history so often seen only through the eyes of men. Caro takes thes
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Jan 09, 2012
Greg
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A story this long—and we're only about one-fifth the way through it—starts to push against the limits of traditional dramaturgy.
What character arcs can hold over 770 pages of careful recounting? Can the story of Lyndon B. Johnson be reduced to man who grew up poor yet found ever greater success, whose hunger for bigger arenas outpaced his ability to dominate them?
That summary, though it provides the psychological backbone of Caro's tale, seems to fall short. It falls short bo More...
What character arcs can hold over 770 pages of careful recounting? Can the story of Lyndon B. Johnson be reduced to man who grew up poor yet found ever greater success, whose hunger for bigger arenas outpaced his ability to dominate them?
That summary, though it provides the psychological backbone of Caro's tale, seems to fall short. It falls short bo More...
Jun 22, 2009
Nicholas
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Aug 25, 2008
Matt
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I like my heroes Greek, as in tragic; the more complicated and conflicted the better. What kind of drama is there is a man finds it easy to make the right choices all the time?
Lyndon Johnson is one of the more-complex statesmen of our nation's history. Caro's biography (this is the first of a proposed four) certainly does the complexity justice. So far I've read two of the four (the fourth has not been written), and thus far easily surpass any biography I've ever read. Caro is an in More...
Lyndon Johnson is one of the more-complex statesmen of our nation's history. Caro's biography (this is the first of a proposed four) certainly does the complexity justice. So far I've read two of the four (the fourth has not been written), and thus far easily surpass any biography I've ever read. Caro is an in More...
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Aug 11, 2008
Aaron
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As a metahistory, one of the more interesting aspects of Caro’s (still ongoing) “Years of Lyndon Johnson” is the changing interpretation of Johnson, from populist, opportunistic striver a la Robert Penn Warren (“The Path to Power”), to corrupted party boss (“Means of Ascent”), to the last liberal icon (“Master of the Senate”). Each volume is a morality play, giving many historical moments idiosyncratic interpretations. “The Path to Power” sets Johnson in contrast to his father (a deeply moral an
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May 25, 2008
Gareth
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I read this book when I was still living in the UK, possibly while I was living in London. My copy is now in my parents house along with a lot of other books I can no longer easily access.
I remember finding it fascinating and I'd actually like to read it again, if I ever get the time.
Below is the review I wrote about it for Amazon.co.uk:
"Although it would be impossible for a short review to really do justice to Caro's epic work on LBJ (of which this is only the More...
I remember finding it fascinating and I'd actually like to read it again, if I ever get the time.
Below is the review I wrote about it for Amazon.co.uk:
"Although it would be impossible for a short review to really do justice to Caro's epic work on LBJ (of which this is only the More...
Sep 21, 2007
Andrew
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Before I read these books, I had no idea that human beings were capable of being Lyndon Johnson. Caro's Johnson books, for me, are weirdly like On the Road: their main use isn't drama, or story, or style (no one can fit two semicolons, three commas, two hyphens and a set of parentheses into a sentence like Robert Caro), or even character, but to show you one extreme end of the range of possible approaches to life. You take from them a sense of possibility; it's frightening to think how it migh
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Sep 07, 2010
Edan
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I fucked up. I started to read Eat Pray Love when I was on page 150 or so of this masterpiece (I had to, for a deadline), and I got derailed. Now that I can return to the chronicles of LBJ, I don't want to. I'm at the homestretch of my own book and I really need to read some novels right now, to help me out. I am in fact lusting after a few specific ones right now. Fiction! Help me!
So, it is with great sadness and disappointment in myself that I put this book down. For now. I am giv More...
So, it is with great sadness and disappointment in myself that I put this book down. For now. I am giv More...
Oct 05, 2009
Dick
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The fascinating story of one of our most complex presidents. Lyndon Johnson was a simultaneous mixture of rogue and hero, easily fixing elections and cheating his way to power while spending time tutoring a local janitor to read without seeking recognition for doing so. Johnson was a prime example of how real people are far more interesting and complex and made up of contradictory mixtures of good and evil than any fictional character. An outstanding biography.
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Nov 19, 2011
Mike
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Caro's LBJ massive three-part biography (part four is pending) isn't just about LBJ: it's about Texas (particularly Texas Hill Country), the Great Depression, the Senate, and the Civil Rights Movement. The books are filled with colorful characters, from Pappy O'Daniel to Richard Russell to LBJ himself. These books not only tell us about LBJ, they tell us about how American came to be the country that it is today.
May 09, 2009
Timothy
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Caro is magnificent. His recounting of the election results in Alice and the work of George Parr is excellent. While I never liked LBJ, he was an incredible politician. This volume is much better than the second, The Means of Assent. The third volume, Master of the Senate, is perhaps the best. Ironically, LBJ as Southern was able to deliver the Civil Rights Legislation once he became President. I am not sure if Kennedy would have been able to accomplish that feat
Jul 29, 2011
I can't say enough about how influential Caro's books have been in my understanding of political life. I really loved this particular book in part because of its vivid description of how the rural electrification administration changed farm life. My great grandfather helped lead that particular struggle for his community, and the story gave me a new appreciation for his work.
Nov 15, 2010
Teddee
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Amazing to see the skills that enabled LBJ's rise to power..."professional son" cultivation of older men, appropriations for business supporters, duplicity, vote buying, illegal contributions, fund raising, finding ways to serve others thereby putting them in his debt, demanding superhuman effort by his people and himself, an astute nose for political analysis, and no loyalties or values except his own ambition (to name a few)
Nov 14, 2011
Michael
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Well-told account of Lyndon Johnson's early years. As moving and fascinating as any novel or play you could imagine - Johnson is truly a Shakespearean character, compelling, affecting and deeply flawed. We owe Caro a great deal to put so much of his life energy into telling this story before the details slip over the historical horizon.
Feb 09, 2010
Vicky
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Not just a bio of LBJ, but a good perspective on poverty, American history, the history of American politics. It puts LBJ in a very negative light, so I'm curious to see how it goes from here. It has changed everything I thought I knew about him. And it's changed the way I look at politics. Definitely planning on reading the next 2 volumes.
