Depth of research and depth of feeling make the difference. This is a great biography not because Caro exposes Lyndon Johnson's ruthlessness, duplicity, and use of money, but because he reveals Johnson's mastery of detail, his impact on other lives, his genius as a hands-on politician. And in that context, Caro's ascription of Johnson's rise to the financial backing of Brown & Root, the Texas contractor, does hot ring wholely true—for at each stage, he demonstrates, Johnson created his own opportunities. The portrait of Johnson's upbringing in Texas' impoverished, isolated Hill Country, and of his boyhood emulation and adolescent rejection of his hero-politician/drunken-failure father, lays the groundwork for Johnson's towering insecurity, his lifelong need to exact "respect—and fear." Rather than go to college as his parents wished, he goes to California (that episode is demythologized); rather than be stuck in Johnson City, he goes to college—where "he began campus politics," started cultivating older men, "stole" his first election, became secretive, and announced (what Caro, ex post facto, perhaps overstresses) his intention to be president. Then, at an Austin high school, he coaches the debating team to the state finals. As the green, 23-year-old secretary to new, playboy congressman Richard Kleberg, he makes a science and an art of answering the mail; as "one of a thousand' congressional aides, he develops the "Little Congress," their organization, as a power base; as a political aspirant, he downplays Kleberg and plays himself up. In a few years, he has entree. And that's why, when a congressional vacancy occurs during his stint as Texas NYA director, he gets key backing for the nomination: someone is needed who (like the deceased) can get a shaky, make-or-break Brown & Root contract cleared. Caro shows Johnson winning that election, vote by vote, "on the forks of the creeks"; persuading rock-bottom Hill Country farmers to enlist in the Agriculture Department's Range Conservation program (and persuading the Department to make it worth their while); bringing electricity to the Hill Country farm wife still "hauling water and hauling wood." If a book so consistently engrossing can be said to peak, it's in the chapters on Johnson as the New Deal's most energetic congressman. But Caro is a believer and Johnson was a trimmer—and so we have the theme of betrayal, the most wrenching of Johnson's iniquities: he betrayed his father by misrepresenting him as a drunken ne'erdo-well; later he would betray his surrogate fathers Sam Rayburn and FDR. There is a serious, hitherto undisclosed romance; there are the promised particulars on Johnson's political legerdemain; there is always the testimony of intimates, and detail upon detail. One is appalled by Johnson—and awed.
Pub Date: Nov. 29, 1982
ISBN: 0679729453
Page Count: 953
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1982
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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