A decent books people ?

I’m not sure that you’ll read this, but I have to write something of this length to get across the nature of one of the best books I am reading.If you take it up or not is n’t my convcern, but maybe someone will rad it who will interested.

The most gripping book I know in history is one that would initially put you off because of its size, but it’s a page-turner and absolutely fascinating. I put off reading it for years because of its size, but once I started it, I realised why it had help people in the US and here ever since it started emerging. Friends of mine started reading it, forbidding as it appears, and are hooked. Prime Minsters and Presidents are hooked.

It’s Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was not a nice person, but not only is Caro a fine writer. The biography is unique – no other book is like it.

For example, Caro goes into Johnson’s schooldays, interviewing his school friends, etc etc. and he does this for each stage of Johnson’s life. Johnson was bitterly scarred in his young days by the humiliation visited on his father, who worked hard for ordinary people in Texas and was turned into a figure of ridicule by the bested interests; the whole family suffered as a result. When he tried to date a local girl, her father forced her to stop seeing Johnson. He made it clear that the Johnson family were not going to do her any good, and that she should marry someone much higher up the social scale. Johnson was so embittered by this that 40 years later, when the leader of the US Senate,  he ordered his motorcade to take a detour and drive very slowly past his former girlfriend’s house. He waved at her slowly with a nasty grin on his face.

In his student days at a primarily women’s college, where he boasted about his organ as @Big jumbo’, he ran for student president. Caro interviews the people concerned, and found that Johnson used really foul tactics to get the vote. he arranged for the class hunk to date and wow the plainest girl in the class to get her vote – she told Caro that she had been overwhelmed, she suddenly felt good about herself, she could hold her head high among her jealous classmates, then after the election she was just unceremoniously dumped and felt like shyte. He was not a nice man, and that was just a starter.

It’s not a biography in the ordinary sense, as Caro is interested in Johnson’s times. This again is unique. Normally a ‘Life and Times’ is just looking at how one person rises to power, and looks at the political history in which that person rises. Not this book. He looks at Johnson’s days as a schoolteacher by interviewing Mexicans who were taught by him as a child, and how they lived. He looks at the Texas of the 1930s through how ordinary people experienced life, the way women had to wash clothes and deal with cooking when there was no or little light in a small sod-house because there was no electricity. It sets the stage for Johnson’s bringing electricity into the valleys, transforming their lives.

Above all, it looks at the ways money greases everything in US politics, and the nasty way in which Johnson was able to gradually persuade the powerful interests in Texas that he was on their side.

Downside which will probably stop you – its size. It is a work in progress, It’s taken 38 years to write, and it won’t be complete for another four years. It’s got as far as the Kennedy assassination and his first months as President. The final volume is due to appear.

The series features in wikipedia –

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Lyndon_Johnson

So the size will probably put you off, but if you want to check it out look in Amazon for Robert Caro’s ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 1, The Path to Power.  Read the description and the reviews. Click on the cover of the book where it says Look Inside and there you can read selections. Maybe, get it out of your library or second-hand from Amazon or ABE ( a separate, comprehensive online second-hand bookshop owned by Amazon, who seem to own everything online these days). If you start reading, you’ll probably want to own the set.

Apologies for the length of this. maybe someone will read it and decide to give it a try.

2 members liked this post.

lindaclemenza7, Jane

Oh yeah….a book…..well if your looking for me to say what you want to hear it won’t happen……best book i read in the last century (and i read a lot) is The Girl on the Train…..to be honest though…..i’m not sure about the ending….

someone suggested a YES man book i forgot the name of it to also someone suggested a soicalist book i forgot that book name to, glad i can help u with book suggestions