Robert Caro’s meticulous biography of Lyndon Johnson is the stuff of legends. I have known about it for years but finally decided this year that it was time to dive in.
It is a fascinating biography of one of the pivotal figures in 20th-century American politics and the times in which he lived. This volume traces Johnson’s early life and career (well, it begins with the geological forces that shaped the part of Texas in which he grew up and a lot of detail about his grandparents before it ever gets to Lyndon).
Learning how Johnson ascended to political power was an illuminating window into national and state politics in the 1920s and 1930s. It also emphasized just how corrupt and fallible Johnson was, as well as his genuine accomplishments.
It is a great story well told. Caro has spent years digging up details. He could be faulted for not being more concise, but that seems like a minor complaint.
'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.
This first instalment tells of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country, revealing in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy and ambition that set LBJ apart. It charts his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut…
I often lean toward non-fiction, but I also enjoy
the diversion of a good novel. This was
Smith’s debut work and one I had not read, but in anticipation of her newest
book I thought I should give it a try. It was well worth it.
This kaleidoscopic portrait of immigrant
London never dragged. It stimulated so
many interesting thoughts about genetics, race, identity, and how they do and
don’t matter.
As someone who believes
good questions are better than answers, the questions that this book posed were
incredibly thought-provoking and helped me to look at the world differently.
One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, "White Teeth" is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.
Peter Attia makes the case
that we need to look at medicine differently.
Modern medicine focuses too much on treating chronic conditions and
diseases once they have emerged. We
should be focusing on harnessing scientific understanding to avoid having them
occur at all, or at least postponing them.
There is a lot of wisdom in his analysis of what might matter to expanding
our health span (years of healthy life), not just life span. Attia can get a bit obsessive at times, but
that is part of the fun of reading this book.
For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of ageing that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late, prolonging lifespan at the expense of quality of life. Dr Peter Attia, the world's top longevity expert, believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalised, proactive strategy for longevity.
This isn't 'biohacking,' it's science: a well-founded strategic approach to extending lifespan while improving our physical, cognitive and emotional health, making each decade better…
Modern economic analysis is centered around the
operation of markets, but markets are treated essentially as a “black box” that
somehow equilibrates supply and demand while determining prices.
This book looks inside this black box,
examining markets as the social and historical constructs they, in fact, are. It does this through a study of the
operation of labor markets during the era of American industrialization and the
mass European immigration that made this industrialization possible.
Historical labor markets successfully
mobilized massive population movements, but they also reinforced the postbellum
isolation of the American South, a market imperfection with lasting
consequences for regional income differences. Mass immigration and southern
isolation were, the book argues, both manifestations of the historical and
social forces that constructed real-world markets.
