What’s the stuff you most wished you could’ve left in? I don’t know if you’re familiar with “Fiddler on the Roof?” You famously have to cut huge chunks 1 of material out of your books before they’re ready to be published. “I feel that I’ve learned about researching power, about how power is obtained, about power is used and how it’s abused,” Caro says, “and I wanted to share some things.” “Working” isn’t meant to be a career capstone for Caro - he’s still plugging away on a final, feverishly anticipated Johnson book - but it is, he explains, a kind of summation. Caro, of course, is responsible for two totems of American political biography: “The Power Broker,” about the New York public servant Robert Moses, responsible for nearly 50 years of sweeping development projects, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” a multivolume account of the life of the 36th president. But the fruits of that labor aren’t exactly ho-hum. Yes, the 83-year-old’s book is a precise and detailed set of recollections about his painstaking, near-mythically thorough job of researching, interviewing, and writing about political figures. Caro’s “Working” is both humbly straightforward and almost comically understated.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |