Description
Book Synopsis‘The greatest biography of our era … Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics’ The Times
Robert A. Caro’s legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Master of the Senate takes Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. Once the most august and revered body in politics, by the time Johnson arrived the Senate had become a parody of itself and an obstacle that for decades had blocked desperately needed liberal legislation. Caro shows how Johnson’s brilliance, charm and ruthlessness enabled him to become the youngest and most powerful Majority Leader in history and how he used his incomparable legislative genius – seducing both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives – to pass the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction.
Trade ReviewThe greatest biography of our era … Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics * The Times *
As if it were possible,
Master of the Senate takes what was already an outstanding multi-volume series on to a still higher plane. It is, quite simply, the finest biography I have ever read, or ever could imagine reading. It is more than that: it is one of the finest works of literature I have ever encountered, or ever hope to * New Statesman *
The breathtaking detail makes it impossible to put down * The Times *
Dazzling ... awesome ... Rarely will you come across a more compelling account of the nature of great power and its entanglement with massive personality. Rarely will you find another biography which is such a fascinating study of how a bad man became a power for the good * Observer *
A wonderful, a glorious tale … It will be hard to equal this amazing book … Caro’s description of how [Johnson passed the civil rights legislation] is masterly; I was there and followed the course of the legislation closely, but I did not know the half of it * New York Times Book Review *
Quite breathtaking ... one of the great political biographies -- Gordon Brown
