The Years of Lyndon Johnson

The greatest study of American political power ever written, four volumes deep and not yet finished. Caro follows Johnson from the Texas hill country to the Senate he mastered to the presidency that passed the Voting Rights Act, and along the way explains the machinery of American politics more completely than any other work. The Senate volume alone is a course in how legislation is actually made. Power, examined by a writer who refuses to look away from how it is used.

The reporter who turned the study of political power into a life's work of a scale almost no one attempts. The Power Broker showed how Robert Moses reshaped a city without ever facing an election. The Years of Lyndon Johnson, four volumes and counting, is the deepest account ever written of how American power is gathered and used. Caro's method is exhaustion in the honorable sense: he finds out everything, and tells it.