The Passage of Power
by Robert A. Caro
- Percentage of approved critics who have given this book a positive review.
Critic Rating
69%
Critic Reviews: 34
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- User rating from iDreamBooks & iTunes
Reader Rating
90%
Reader Ratings: 488
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Synopsis
Book Four of Robert A. Caro's monumental The Years of Lyndon Johnson displays all the narrative energy and illuminating insight that led the Times of London to acclaim it as "one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age. A masterpiece." The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career-1958 to1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had... more
About Robert A. Caro
- All Critics: 34
- Positive: 24
- Negative: 10
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The Washington Post | 1 May 2012
The LBJ that Caro gives us is not an inaccurate portrait, but it’s certainly a subjective one — an idiosyncratic expression of Caro’s own sensibility.
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The New York Times | 2 May 2012
L.B.J. got to me, and after all these years, he still does. With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.
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Los Angeles Times | 6 May 2012
The author has written his best installment in his biographical series.
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Kirkus Reviews | 1 Apr 2012
As in the earlier volumes, Caro...combines a compelling narrative and insightful authorial judgments into a lengthy volume that will thrill those who care about American politics, the foundations of power, or both.
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GQ | 9 May 2012
...the cliche that pops up most often in reviews of his Johnson bio is "magisterial," and let's cue the laughter right there... "obsessive," the altogether more accurate cliche...surfaces sooner or later in most profiles of the author.
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Seattle Times | 13 May 2012
This book shows the mastery of Johnson in politics, and also the mastery of Caro in biography.
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San Francisco Chronicle | 13 May 2012
This slice of American history is well known. But with Caro's narration, it burns anew.
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Willamette Week | 2 May 2012
Writing like this is enough to make other historians weep. It is what the hell history is for.
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Tampa Bay Times | 29 Apr 2012
"Magisterial" is a faint description of these deeply researched, beautifully written, always insightful works.
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The Commentator | 31 May 2012
For those who have read the author’s previous three volumes on Johnson, ‘Passage’ is probably the most accessible, and given that it’s the most contemporary, will likely engage more readers.
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The New York Times | 29 Apr 2012
It’s a breathtakingly dramatic story about a pivotal moment in United States history...
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Entertainment Weekly | 27 Apr 2012
Passage is an essential document of a turning point in American history. It's also an incisive portrait of one great, terrible, fascinating man suddenly given the chance to reinvent the country in his image.
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The Telegraph | 16 Jul 2012
...a true story of huge personalities, bloody assassinations, loves, hatreds and betrayals (and the Kennedy family) that renders it by turns gripping, sensational and immensely depressing.
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Slate | 31 May 2012
...when it came to the defining episode of JFK’s presidency...Caro left many pages—whole documents—unturned, unread, unopened. Either that, or...he chopped and twisted the record to make it fit his narrative.
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Deep Politics Forum | 7 May 2012
If the Johnson of Volumes 1 and 2 is the “bad” L.B.J., then the Johnson of Volume 4 is the “good” one. It is almost as if Caro is writing about two different people — as if, for all his reportorial skill, he can’t countenance Johnson being both ruthless and compassionate in the same volume.
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The Globe and Mail | 11 May 2012
Like many biographies today, this one is too long, with too many minor tributaries swelled with the arcana that other historians – if not Caro himself – have already visited.
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Military.com | 30 Apr 2012
...Caro exposes his chief flaw as a storyteller: A tendency to pound home his thorough research with unrelenting emphasis...by the time Caro was done delineating JFK's pain, I felt my own back start to spasm.
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The Washington Times | 15 May 2012
Mr. Caro’s assessment of Johnson’s life and times has varied considerably in the course of the four volumes he has compiled on the controversial Texan.
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The New York Review of Books | 24 May 2012
Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson...was originally conceived and has been largely executed as a study of power. But this volume has been overtaken by a more pressing theme. It is a study in hate.
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Salon | 7 May 2012
I feel I’ve just read the same book twice. “The Passage to Power” breaks down to four books, one worth reading.
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The Wall Street Journal | 27 Apr 2012
This is LBJ's world of brutal realpolitik, and Robert Caro welcomes us in: hardly a gay place but, like the best of thrillers, a many-shaded one.
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Publishers Weekly | 26 Mar 2012
Caro’s ugly, tormented, heroic Johnson makes an apt embodiment of an America struggling toward epochal change, one with a fascinating resonance in our era of gridlocked government and paralyzed leadership.
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The Berkshire Review | 3 Aug 2012
The first 47 days of the Johnson administration, in which the best version of the man took charge, culminate this volume and are well worth the several hundred pages Caro devotes to them.
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Open Letters Monthly | 5 Aug 2012
Caro brings a few rare qualities to the art of biography, and one of them is a meticulousness bordering on pathology...So the series inches forward like defrosting molasses.
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Washington Independent Review of Books
There are passages in this book that, once read, will never leave the reader...It is for passages such as this that one reads biography and why one should read this great book.
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Book Reporter | 25 May 2012
Describing these books as simply a biography of Lyndon Johnson is inadequate. To read them is to read about America...
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The Sydney Morning Herald | 23 Jun 2012
The virtuosity of the narrative is driven by the depth and breadth of Caro's research, which gives him a command of detail, and great detail is the essence of great writing.
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Newsday | 26 Apr 2012
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a compact library: brilliant biography, gripping history, searing political drama and an incomparable study of power.
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The Boston Globe | 13 May 2012
Making ordinary politics and policymaking riveting and revealing is what makes Caro a genius.
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NPR | 2 May 2012
By writing the best presidential biography the country has ever seen, he's forever changed the way we think, and read, American history.
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The New York Times | 2 May 2012
L.B.J. got to me, and after all these years, he still does. With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.
Full ReviewThe Passage of Power -
The New York Times | 29 Apr 2012
It’s a breathtakingly dramatic story about a pivotal moment in United States history...
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The Guardian | 9 Jun 2012
In his decades of exploration, Caro has all but gone broke, uprooted his wife Ina from New York to live for years in the vast, isolated Texas Hill Country...The pay-off has been four magnificent volumes...
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