The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Volume I: The Path to Power

Caro, Robert A.

ISBN 10: 0394499735 / ISBN 13: 9780394499734

Editore: Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, Random House, Inc., New York, 1982

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CLASSIC: SUPERB: PROFOUNDLY PERCEPTIVE: MAGISTERIAL: Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award: VG to NEAR FINE First Edition hardcover (Orig. November 29, 1982)) Third Printing, VG mylar-protected jacket w/ EXCELLENT edges & corners, FINE strikingly handsome silk-finish black linen-over-boards cover w/ sharp NEW edges & corners & "Robert A. Caro" gilt-stamped on the front panel (centered) & titles gilt-stamped on spine, VG slightly time-soiled text-block exterior w/ smooth-cut top & bottom edges & cut-page-style "deckle" side-edging, EXCELLENT sewn binding w/ tight signatures & blue-yellow-checked cloth bands at spine-caps & uncreased spine, IMPECCABLE ocher-gold card-stock end-papers, PRISTINE interior printed w/ HANDSOME CLARITY in classic Times Roman on EXCELLENT unblemished archival paper * Introduction (xiii); Debts, Bibliography, Notes (769); Index (849) * Map: Texas & The Tenth District (box insert) * Illustrations: 48 pp. in 3 inserts presenting 90 carefully selected b-w photographs on excellent gloss-laminated stock: following p. 102 (16 pp. 28 b-w photos), p. 358 (16 pp. 26 b-w photos) & p. 582 (16 pp. 36 photos) * 6.50" x 9.50" x 2.00", 1.50 kg, xxiii+882 (905) pp. * ABOUT THE BOOK: The story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country, "The Path to Power" reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy & ambition that set LBJ apart. It follows him from the Hill Country to New Deal Washington, from his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, & his attainment, nonetheless, at age 31, of the national power for which he hungered. In this book, we are brought as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process. * HIGHEST PRAISE: "The profound understanding of the uses & abuses of power Robert Caro displayed in his 1974 biography of Robert Moses "The Power Broker" is a scathing achievement the author surpassed w/ panache in this, his 2nd book. Caro's dogged research & refusal to accept received wisdom results in an eye-opening portrait that unforgettably captures the titanic personality of Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973). Though stronger on Johnson's duplicity & naked self-promotion than his intelligence & charm, Caro nails it all. He chronicles the evolution of an attention-demanding youth from the Texas hill country into a seasoned congressman who would abandon his ardent espousal of the New Deal as soon as it ceased to be expedient. The dirty details begin w/ college elections that earn young Lyndon a reputation as a crook & a liar; Caro goes on to unravel financial shenanigans of impressive ingenuity. Johnson's consuming desire to get ahead & his political genius "unencumbered by philosophy or ideology" are staggering. The White House, Great Society & Vietnam lie ahead when the main narrative closes in 1941, but the roots of Johnson's future achievements & tragic failures are laid bare. This biography may well stand as the best book written in the 2nd half of the 20th century about personal ambition inextricably linked with historic change." - Wendy Smith * SHIPPING: MNEMOSYNE carefully wraps & packages this splendid book w/ our greatest care for FREE shipment via USPS MEDIA MAIL within the United States & its territories or via USPS PRIORITY MAIL for a below cost fee, w/ international shipping at our posted rates.

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Volume I: The Path to Power
• Editore: Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, Random House, Inc., New York
• Data di pubblicazione: 1982
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0394499735
• ISBN 13: 9780394499734
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Edizione: Edition Unspecified
• Stampa: Printing Unstated
• Condizione: Very Good
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: Very Good
• Peso: 1,5 chilogrammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. No president—no era of American politics—has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak.

The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered.
 
We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate—coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon—raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin—lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible” goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be.

We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam” Raybum (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters . . .
 
Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection” in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines.
 
We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness” of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ.
 
Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.

Informazioni sull?autore

For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, ROBERT A. CARO has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, has three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal, stating at the time: “I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was twenty-two years old and just being mesmerized, and I’m sure it helped to shape how I think about politics.” The London Sunday Times has said that Caro is “The greatest political biographer of our times.”  
 
Caro’s first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, everywhere acclaimed as a modern classic, was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. It is, according to David Halberstam, “Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.” And The New York Times Book Review said: “In the future, the scholar who writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort.” 

The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, was cited by The Washington Post as “proof that we live in a great age of biography . . . [a book] of radiant excellence . . . Caro’s evocation of the Texas Hill Country, his elaboration of Johnson’s unsleeping ambition, his understanding of how politics actually work, are—let it be said flat out—at the summit of American historical writing.” Professor Henry F. Graff of Columbia University called the second volume, Means of Ascent, “brilliant. No review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is nothing less than how present-day politics was born.” The London Times hailed volume three, Master of the Senate, as “a masterpiece . . . Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.” The Passage of Power, volume four, has been called “Shakespearean . . . A breathtakingly dramatic story [told] with consummate artistry and ardor” (The New York Times) and “as absorbing as a political thriller . . . By writing the best presidential biography the country has ever seen, Caro has forever changed the way we think about, and read, American history” (NPR). On the cover of The New York Times Book Review, President Bill Clinton praised it as “Brilliant . . . Important . . . Remarkable. With this fascinating and meticulous account Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.” 
 
“Caro has a unique place among American political biographers,” The Boston Globe said . . . “He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.” And Nicholas von Hoffman wrote: “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”

Born and raised in New York City, Caro graduated from Princeton University, was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, the historian and writer.