Robert caro lbj biography path

Caro is currently working on the fifth and, presumably, final volume in his LBJ series. Originally intended to be the first of just three volumes, its pages follow Johnson from birth through his unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in This biography is the result of seven years of research by Caro and his wife — a remarkable effort in which he conducted approximately 1, interviews.

It is a profoundly penetrating and extraordinarily insightful narrative of the early life of one of our most complex and colorful presidents.

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Caro is undeniably unique among the different biographers I have encountered. Although his writing style is articulate and descriptive, it is not smooth or elegant in a traditional sense. Caro can be both verbose and repetitive and it is not uncommon for his sentences to exceed 60 or 70 words involving a half-dozen commas …or more. But they are often linguistic works of art which embed penetrating insights, keen observations and clever syntax.

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The first one-third of this volume is brilliant…and very nearly perfect. Two chapters on rural electrification and life without electric power are among the most interesting in the book. The remaining twenty-two chapters are solid-to-excellent though not as consistently engaging or efficiently impactful as earlier chapters.

Nearly every one of these multi-page introductions is a literary jewel and in many cases they describe individuals not widely known: Alvin Wirtz, Herman Brown, Tommy Corcoran and Charles Marsh. Few if any biographers can understand a subject and his or her surroundings, or place the reader in the thick of events, like Caro.

But the cost is not trivial: this biography demands a much higher than average level of patience and perseverance from its audience. Caro seems compelled to include in the text each new, interesting morsel he unearthed in his research and appears to leave no stone unturned in his quest to decipher this complicated man. And while Caro is prone to detail, he is equally inclined to digression.