BOOKS THREAD

I saw 1964 in a very good foreign bookstore last week and thought it over. I have my hands full with other stuff right now but I will be giving it a try at some point.

The late shift in the LBJ historiography is of great interest to me. There have been greater vistas of understanding reached on him since a certain morning in 2001 than ever would have seemed possible. These new LBJ works make Goodwin look like coloring book.

 

I wonder to what extent the latest Caro book about his presidency will reflect those shifts?

 

If the first three were any indication, Caro's forthcoming volume on his presidency is going to knock people flat on their ass. Where he's sifting through 60,000 pages of documents and saying something new, others are merely making casserole.

Recently found this amusing 1991 rant by Sidney Blumenthal on some of Caro's methods.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE7DB173CF932A05750C0A967958260

 

I thought about picking up that Nixonland book, but it was going to cost $40 with sales tax.

That's just insane. I'll wait for the paperback or see if it lands at Half-Price books.

 

His LBJ trilogy, as I believe LJB pointed out earlier, is a literary and historical masterpiece.

Is this new book the fourth and final volume, the one chronicling LBJ's presidency? Or is it on something else?

 

Birdscribe --

Yep. Two Pulitzers. That's rarefied air.

The next volume is on the presidency. He has said he will be fair and charitable, though his critics have said an overabundance of that has marred the previous books.

 

I'm about finished with Brave New World. I thought I'd read it before, but I was wrong. I still can't believe it was actually written in 1932.

 

Yes, heaven forbid he should point out when LBJ was a tool and when he wasn't. Unlike McCullough's tiresome reach-around to John Adams, you actually felt like you got inside LBJ's brain.

When is this coming out?

 

I'm not sure. The last book came out five or six years ago, so I would think it's soon.

McCullough really has no shame. The new Adams DVD set has a featurette titled "David McCullough: Painting With Words." I laughed out loud in the Best Buy when I saw that. Big Dave's newest big up to the people is a compendium of historical figures' letters to posterity. More low-lying fruit.

 

I really can't recommend Rome 1960: the Games that Changed the World by David Maraniss enough. I think Maraniss is great and the reporting he did for this book will blow you away. The little stories he was able to get show the amount of research he did to make sure no stone was left unturned. It can be slow at times, but most of it is really well done.

 

The thing is, I LOVED his Truman bio. Perhaps that's because Truman's my favorite president, but I thought it was a far more even-handed look at what made the 33rd president tick. He didn't Campho-Phenique Truman's warts like he did with Adams.

After I finish "Team of Rivals" (and I've got about another 100 or so pages), this is next on the word parade.

 

The Truman book was very well-received, as all of his are. He has great penetration and people do love him, I give him that. But instead of applying ointment to his subject, McCullough just pulled memoranda out of his ass that doesn't exist, and kept the filthy lie there for dozens of printings of the Truman book. And when he gets called on it, he stops being the endearing old raconteur and starts being nasty and threatens litigation.

http://www.mobylives.com/Nobile_Pulitzer_speech.html

Three Pulitzers that should be revoked. Two of them belong to "lovable" pop historians.