neiljung78's reviews
293 reviews

I either didn’t like or didn’t get these poems. The very tight and direct rhymes clanged rather than sharpened.

Compellingly plausible and chilling. One of those novels about having murdered someone that makes you really glad you’ve not murdered someone.

This demanded my concentration, till I was able to really go with it, but then it was very rewarding, not least in how funny it was. Long time since I read a book like this; where your nailed moment to moment inside a the protagonist’s head but it made me hungry for more like this.

I am finding these war books the best of the sequence. God, is it making me want to read it all again? There’s something comforting in the idea that the same people keep cropping up in your life but maybe it’s more true if your from the ruling class.

This is probably good but it made me miserable quite a lot

It is as compelling and comprehensive as its reputation, tho my hunch is Caro is more astute about political power than he is about personal power (he has some maybe ‘of his time’ ideas about Johnson dominating the personality of weaker men). Apparently when Nixon read it, he said ‘it makes Johnson seem like a goddam animal… which he was!’ And Caro does seem disgusted by Johnson’s character, especially in the early chapters (and he devotes a few paragraphs to Johnson’s habit of making people take dictation off him while he was shitting). But the flip side of the coin, in the New Deal chapters, is a rigorous evocation of how government can get stuff done and change people’s lives. The chapter about how electricity was brought to rural Texas and Johnson’s role in getting that done (at least for his own district) makes a case for the whole book.

Yes, I liked this. I liked that the way the story is told introduced us to more characters as we went along, all of whom seemed real and vivid. It seemed clear eyed but not cynical about people and the world 

Thought provoking.

I enjoyed this. Either I’m just getting used to it or the way stuff gives it a focus or poignancy that appeals to me.

I loved this. I mibbie didn’t get it all. I want to read it again.