Book cover of Means of Ascent

Book description

In "Means of Ascent", Caro covers the years 1941-48, years in the wilderness for Johnson, who had been devastatingly defeated for the Senate in 1941, but years of fascination for the biographer and for anyone interested in the more extreme grotesqueries of American politics. For this is the period when…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Means of Ascent as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I loved the way Caro takes an enormous amount of detail from a portion of Lyndon Johnson's life and weaves it into a digestible -- albeit large -- depiction of the complexities that made Lyndon Johnson what David Halberstam called "a politician the like of which we shall not see again in this country."

Those who overestimate the reach of social science, and those who overestimate the extent to which statistical correlations can enlighten us, can be guilty of dismissing historians and biographers as people who traffic too extensively in anecdotal evidence. But when so many anecdotes are brought to…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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