Word: caro
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...please don't characterize any of these activities as obsessions. The word has that connotation, you know: zealous, pathological--dare I say it?--nuts. This, undoubtedly, is why Robert A. Caro abjures it; says, instead, that he has spent the past 27 years writing his monumental 1,000-plus-page volumes on the life of Lyndon Johnson, with many more years in both his life and Johnson's to go, because he is "interested in how power works." Interested, indeed. Captain Ahab was "interested" in Moby Dick. "Between love and madness lies" Calvin Klein's "Interest...
Master of the Senate (Knopf), the third volume of Robert Caro's massive biography of Johnson, splendidly reassembles the U.S. Senate of those Eisenhower years, the arena of L.B.J.'s rapid rise to national power, from freshman Senator in 1949 to the youngest Senate Democratic leader ever, in four short years. Caro, whose great gifts are indefatigable legwork and a sense of historical drama and character, has a fine protagonist for his life's work. His Johnson, a man of Manichaean contraries, is now familiar--by turns Caligula and Lincoln, a narcissistic monster capable of immense personal cruelty and breathtaking...
Part of the key, Caro writes, lay in Johnson's astonishing ability to talk himself into anything, including, sometimes, the right thing. (Bill Clinton also possessed the trait.) "[Johnson] had a remarkable capacity," Caro observes, "to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past...
...Caro seems energized by his ambivalence toward L.B.J. Sheer ambition drove the Johnsonian dialectic portrayed in Master. First, Johnson veered to the right and allied himself with conservative Southerners when he arrived at the Senate in 1949. Some years later, he emerged as the hero of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. L.B.J. saw that he could never be elected President if he was perceived as merely a Southerner; he also saw that the civil rights bill was just and necessary...
...long-awaited third volume of Robert Caro?s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, "Master of the Senate," will be published this spring. PW predicts that despite its 1,152-page length, it will "rise to the top of critics? reading piles and April bestseller lists." First serial rights to the New Yorker...