The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00GS4WUIW | Format: PDF, EPUB
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This is 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, and 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, and 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. Means of Ascent, Book Two of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, was a number-one national best seller and, like The Path to Power, received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 40 hours and 29 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Audible Studios
- Audible.com Release Date: December 10, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GS4WUIW
This book, published in 1982, has already achieved a legendary status among history and political buffs. When it was released its author, Robert Caro, won enormous acclaim for his unprecedented research and engrossing writing style - and plenty of criticism for his harsh and unsparing portrait of Lyndon Johnson. Caro literally spent years living in and interviewing people in the arid Texas Hill Country where Johnson was born and raised, and in the process he acquired a level of knowledge about his topic that few other biographers even approach. Like William Manchester's "Last Lion" biographies of Winston Churchill, "The Path to Power" is far more than a simple biography of the young Lyndon Johnson's desperate desire to escape the grinding poverty of rural Texas in the 1930's and achieve power in Washington. Caro writes unforgettably of the Johnson family, the culture and history of the Texas Hill Country, the incredibly corrupt political system in Texas at the time, and of how Johnson both brilliantly and cynically manipulated that system for his own purposes. Caro's descriptions of the people in LBJ's life - from his mother to his wife Lady Bird to fellow Texan Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives and Johnson's mentor in national politics - are superb and detailed.
However, Caro's unsparing portrait of LBJ as a power-obsessed liar and bully who would stop at nothing to succeed greatly offended many of LBJ's associates whom Caro had interviewed, as well as liberal historians who cherished Johnson's activism on Civil Rights and other liberal causes (and who conveniently wanted to forget Johnson's record in Vietnam and elsewhere).
I picked up this book largely ignorant of LBJ (he died 4 months before I was born), so I had little preconceived notions of the man. This fine bio really opened up the future president as a real person to me.
Too often, books about presidents try to paint the subject as either a great man or a scoundrel. While seeming to do the latter, the author actually dodges both categories and simply tells a tale of the creation of a president. Caro subscribes to a hybrid of the "nature or nurture" theory (one of genetics or surroundings affecting what kind of person you become). Accordingly, Caro doesn't even really address his subject until fairly deep into the text, the first part of the book being more of a brief history of the Texas Hill Country through the eyes of LBJ's family line. By doing so, he thoroughly covers LBJ's origins (both familial and geographic).
When he does start looking at Johnson it is, admittedly, less than flattering. But it is REAL. Not really knowing much about the man he would become, I found the boy and man that he had been to be surprisingly real. This book doesn't seem to take a political tone that so many of the biographies of recent figures do. Caro avoids the commentary common on famous people that are still remembered (as opposed to say Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington) who still carry with them an emotional context for many Americans.
Caro certainly has strong opinions, but he makes a clear distinction between those opinions and facts, often phrasing opinions in a paragraph of questions to make the reader think about the material he just digested. It is clear what he thinks the answers are, but he refrains from actually answering them for you.
Whatever your take on Caro's Johnson, one has to respect his view as an informed one.
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