Grad students and history lovers take note: Plight of the Reluctant has devised the altogether fiendish Robert Caro drinking game. “Drink once if Caro describes Lyndon Johnson’s stride…Drink once if LBJ’s weight or face is mentioned,” etc., etc. Thank goodness I was unaware of this amusement while slogging through The Power Broker.
5 thoughts on “Means of Descent.”
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Caro’s a biographer, not a historian.
Hmm…That’s a pretty narrow distinction, isn’t it? Biographical history? Historical biography? We’re all in the same gang. 😉
Well, I’d categorize Caro’s LBJ books as political histories AND highly detailed, damn near exhausting biographies. In Master of the Senate, the man does, after all, devote the first 150 pages of the book to the history of the Senate. And, later, he contrasts the lynchings of Till, et al. against the necessity of the Democrats to adopt civil rights. Johnson’s life was entirely about cutting deals. And his decisions had substantial effects upon history.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Caro’s work and think he’s first-rate at what he does — I just don’t think that thing is history. My idea of history hasn’t much to do with, you know, trying to understand individuals. I don’t think I read a single book about an individual through 8 years of history grad school.
Perhaps it’s a subfield thing. I’ve encountered a number of biographies over on the Americanist side of things, such as The Power Broker, Alan Brinkley’s Voices of Protest, Eric Foner’s Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, or Robert Dallek’s LBJ series, to name just a few. What about a book like Robert Conquest’s Stalin? That’s basically a bio.