Italics are mine

NYRB's June 6 issue

I always love the New York Review of Books, but the June 6 issue was particularly good, bringing together so many great writers I adore, publishing reviews about books I've just bought and telling me about movies and artists I can't wait to discover more about.

I'd noticed on the cover the names of Alma Guillermoprieto and Anne Applebaum so I knew from the start I was going to spend a lot of time reading this issue. Applebaum in particular belongs to my pantheon of my favorite female writers, right up there with Jane Mayer. She always writes compellingly about difficult topics, from the Gulag to the crushing of Eastern Europe after World War II to the famine in Ukraine under Stalin. Her essay discusses a recent book by Ian Kershaw on Europe from 1950 to 2017. The main point she makes is that for the most part the book covers much similar material to Tony Judt's Postwar, except for the fact that it extends about a decade after the end of Judt's book, and that extra decade is key in witnessing critical changes about the perception of Europe and even the likelihood of its survival as an institution. 

I've also read Guillermoprieto's prose many times in The New Yorker and the NYRB, as well as her books on dancing for Cuba and dispatches from Latin America. Her essay was the transcript of the Robert B. Silvers lecture she gave at the New York Public Library back in December. It is a haunting account of her early days as a reporter in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, and of the misery that Richard Nixon's war on drugs has brought to the region.

I picked up the biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke by George Packer (who wrote the National Book Award winner The Unwinding a few years back) at the bookstore the other day so I was thrilled to see it was the object of a review in the NYRB. Those reviews are always so informative and help me focus on the most important part of the book. Here, what stuck with me was the revelation that, on a fateful day in Sarajevo, 3 U.S. diplomats died because Holbrooke liked speed and the car he was in was going too fast down a treacherous, windy road (well-known to be treacherous). The heavier vehicle behind it that the 3 U.S. aides were in was trying to catch up with Holbrooke's car and went off the road. Such a waste because someone liked speed too much. (The book review is aptly named The Fog of Ambition, in an allusion to Robert McNamara.) After I read that I was glad that Packer's verdict on Holbrooke was "almost great" (emphasis on almost), the story of a man who wanted to do a lot more and fell short. We don't need people like that to achieve greatness, thank you very much. Oblivion will do just fine. 

Two other gems in this issue of the NYRB were the article about jazz musician Don Cherry (I was almost at the end of the article before I realized his children were pop star Neneh Cherry and singer Eagle-Eye Cherry, whom I remember listening to when I was much younger) and the review of the prize-winning movie - at the Cannes Festival - Capernaum. I also enjoyed reading the review of the book Churchill: Walking with Destiny, of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of art and identity in the ancient Middle East and of the exhibition that stopped by Houston last year on the royal arts of Jodhpur. I didn't care for the book of stories by Karen Russell but other than that I liked just about everything in this issue.

Review of "Path to Power: The Years of LBJ vol.1"

I've been trying to read that book for a long time, and in the end getting the audio version of it is what did the trick. I first discovered the audio versions of Caro's books when I purchased "The Passage of Power: The Years of LBJ vol.4" (about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath) as an audiobook, read by the spellbinding Grover Gardner, having had the volume 1 in paperback for a while then, along with Caro's tome on Robert Moses, and yet having been unable to read either past the first few chapters, because their page counts reach about 1000 and the task looked too formidable and my schedule too crammed with other things for me to have any chance to ever finish those books. But back in those years I lived in Pennsylvania and driving down to DC fairly often - a three-hour drive each way - and the Passage of Power audiobooks provided the perfect companion to a drive through the fields of Pennsylvania and Maryland, as well as, later, "Being Nixon: A Man Divided" by Evan Thomas, a book I'll get back to when I write my review of his biography of Sandra Day O'Connor.  

So I finally "read" the LBJ volume 1 book and my conclusion is that Robert Caro is a national treasure, although LBJ is such a deeply flawed individual that every time I was tempted to feel sorry for him, for instance when "Pappy" O'Daniel apparently stole the 1941 election from him on Election Day, he later did something to make me stop feeling sorry for him very fast, such as the way he went about to use FDR and put an end to the tax investigation into the great LBJ donors Brown & Root. The hardscrabble upbringing and outsized ambition make LBJ a fascinating character, but it is a good thing we all know his ambition was felled down because of Vietnam, although I wish it had been felled down earlier. 

What interested me the most in this LBJ profile, or what I know of it (which right now is limited to the first and fourth volume of Caro's biography, although now that I live in Texas I have bought more books about LBJ, especially the Doris Kearns Goodwin one and the Califano memoir), is the ups and downs LBJ had to face in his career to get to where he wanted. These days would-be self-styled influencers try to gain followers by claiming one just has to think success and it will materialize easily if one imagines it vividly enough, but no one wanted success more than Lyndon Johnson and he still faced a couple of heartbreaking defeats, high-stakes elections including the 1948 one that he could not lose if he hoped for any sort of political future, and of course the years he spent powerless in the shadow of JFK. He does provides a certain lesson in resilience, although his accompanying cunningness was nothing to emulate. But he is a good example for students that sometimes you can want something completely and absolutely and still not get it for a while, and face setbacks, and have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. 

LBJ was overall a very unlikable man, and I hold against him the way he later treated Sam Rayburn, a man who viewed LBJ as his own son and was instrumental to his political ascent. (He betrayed Rayburn in 1940 by working behind the scenes to keep the Texas delegation for FDR, although of course when it became politically convenient LBJ ditched FDR too.) It is hard to extract any high-level lesson from LBJ's life. Some people would argue that LBJ got to have a lot more impact on the country than Rayburn ever did, but he took such pains in creating his legend (a legend not pierced through until Caro started working on his biography) that he can't have been indifferent to people learning the truth about him. I wonder what Caro's fifth volume about LBJ will say. It will cover the end of his presidency and the few years he survived his loss of power. Will Caro show us a man with remorse? or only regrets that he couldn't hold on to power longer?