Lyndon B. Johnson : Portrait of a President |
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Lyndon B. Johnson : Portrait of a President
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by Robert Dallek
Sales Rank: 724510
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$18.21
At Amazon
on 4-15-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 406 pages
ISBN 10 Number: 0195159217
ASIN: B000F4LMMQ
Book Dimensions:
8.9 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
Weighs: 1.1 pounds
From Booklist
Until Robert Caro completes his multivolume opus, Dallek's two-volume LBJ biography is the best one available. Dallek's work reflects impressive detachment toward a figure about whom few were neutral, least of all LBJ himself. He inherited an elevated sense of self, according to Dallek, who describes the Johnson family's relatively high place on the local social ladder despite their poverty. But LBJ's ego was strangely fragile and self-pitying, and in the conclusion, Dallek questions, after narrating the fateful decisions to escalate the Vietnam conflict, Johnson's "capacity to make rational life and death decisions." He lived and conducted politics as a personal enterprise, as Dallek's account of LBJ's wheeling-and-dealing rise from congressional aide to president illustrates. On the un-seamy side, Dallek credits LBJ's personal experience with poverty as a motive in his championing the social and civil rights enactments of the 1960s. In Dallek's hands, Johnson is complex, deceitful, and idealistic, and the author shows why the man's legacy, both positive and negative, will always command interest and debate. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Booklist
"Dallek's work reflects impressive detachment toward a figure about whom few were neutral, least of all LBJ himself."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (Hardcover)
Robert Dallek has abriged his two volume set (nearly 1,500 pages) down to 400+ pages. Mr. Dallek is a solid writer and researcher. His biography will give you a sense of LBJ as a person and a politican, his accomplishments and his life & times. This will remain as the best single-volume biography available to the reader. So if reading just one book on LBJ is your goal, then this is your book. Having said that, I wish to encourage the reader to explore either Mr. Dallek's original set or the never-ending magnum opus of Robert Caro (three volunes and over 2,700 pages so far). For better or for worse, LBJ was second only to FDR for his domination and impact upon the American political scene in a forty year career that stretched from the 1930's to the 1960's. LBJ had an outsized personality and ambitions that was his strength and, ultimately, his weakness. Although Mr. Dallek does a excellent job in condensing his prior work, no single volume can ever do justice to the life of LBJ. Personally, I prefer Robert Caro's massive, and sometimes, exhaustive work (his current three books only cover LBJ up to 1960, the same time period for Mr. Dallek's original first volume). Mr. Caro is a wonderful storyteller (somewhat akin to William Manchester) and you are swept away in his epic tale of LBJ. In deciding what to read, it really comes down to how much time and how much interest the reader has in the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
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Lyndon B. Johnson : Portrait of a President
Available from Amazon
Price: $18.21
Updated on 4-15-2008.
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