Agreed. It's a short read that demonstrates his writing skill, his methods, and his goal of explaining how political power is acquired and used. It inspired me to start on the LBJ biography.
It's incredible how good those books are, and I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who hasn't experienced them. I read them over two years ago and still remember many details as if I read them yesterday. This is quite rare for me, given how much I read. Strangely, I didn’t have the same experience with "The Power Broker."
Ever since finishing them, I have been on the hunt for historical biographies of similar quality. While I haven't found any that match up completely, here are a few that come close in my opinion:
* Truman by David McCullough
* Grant by Ron Chernow
* American Caesar by William Manchester
I've also read the three-part Churchill series by Manchester, but it didn’t quite measure up to the LBJ series for me.
If you have any other suggestions, please share them!
My brother in law loves Vonnegut, I read all of his books also. Personally, I don't understand the appeal
I loved the Manchester series on Churchill. The others you mention are all on the 'to read' list for me already.
My favorite recent biography was on both JCR Licklider and the world he helped create; 'The Dream Machine', Waldrop.
Even more abstract, 'The Prize', Yergin, might be called a biography of the oil industry and 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is a biograpy of that dread beast. Those were my favorite books before starting Caro.
If you like history, have you read "From the Founding of the City"?
It's slow to start as the Romans fight the same Veientes a hundred times over, but when it's good, it's really good.
The stories are historic so there are realistic lessons in them. It's interesting as a working class person to read how the plebs were able to take some power from the owning class, for example.
The battles are tactical. The heroes are epic. The highs are very high and the lows very low.
Anyways it was preserved on paper 2000 years for a reason. It's unbelievably good.
Two of Caro's books remain in my favorites today: The Power Broker; and Master of the Senate. The concept of political power, mentioned in the conversation, is fully limned out in both of them. Worth reading by anyone with an interest in how the real world works. Unfortunately, Vonnegut, I never quite got. YMMV.
The podcast 99% Invisible is doing a series of monthly episodes on The Power Broker. I don’t live in NY and I don’t pretend to really understand NY, but it’s so interesting to listen to the hosts as they work their way through Caro’s massive book. I really enjoy it and just wish the episodes were more frequent than once a month.
When I got the book honestly the first thing I did was to look for Jane Jacobs in the index, and I was surprised not to see her there. Thanks for this!
I recently saw a guy on Amtrak reading an old, maybe original edition hardback of The Power Broker and it was even bigger! Just way too big to be practical. By comparison the current paperback edition is almost portable.
Player Piano and Sirens of Titan were the options when I was in high school. I can't remember which I read first but I liked it so much I begged to borrow a copy and read the other. I've never agreed with a lot of his viewpoints, and Vonnegut was (like all of us) a flawed human being, but his writing transcended a lot of that, which is somewhat odd because it's so incredibly personal. That contradiction probably says more about me than him.
t'other way about for me. I love Vonnegut loads so I read it, but
discovered an American writer/reporter that I never heard of. Most
interesting. Particularly that theme where idealists seek power to
achieve objectives independently of functional democracy; it seems
human, vital, problematic and American - all in a wholly positive way
- but clearly different cultures have different takes on power and
where the limits of 'visionaries' ought to be.
Vonnegut said a couple of things struck a chord with me:
"Novelists are famous as being lousy mates, whether males or females, and one reason is that they have to concentrate all the time or they’ll lose the thread of the novel. It’s all in the head, and they have information pouring in from the outside they’re going to lose and so they will pretend to hear you, but they’re really some- where else."
Later on he says...
"It’s nowhere else and so they don’t want to lose it and if you interrupt a novelist it’s a disaster for him."
Maybe software developers and novelists have some inner workings in common!
I think very much so. Certainly not your work-a-day Jirs-story muncher, but when you hole away building a new concept that turns into a commitment you emerge a year later having lived and breathed that software for 12-16 hours a day you understand what it's like. When you take breaks it's to do some creative thinking. You never really stop but to eat, sleep, and... drink.
More amazing is how Caro paints the picture that really proves the point.
LBJ was a despicable human being in many ways. But, he truly believed in civil rights and making life better for ordinary people. Caro captures the toil of the hill country farm wife and the oppression of Mexican-Texans — and what Johnson did for them — vividly.
Moses was almost the opposite. He built an idealist vision in the 1920s… and never evolved. As his power peaked, he did not understand why people were against him after what he had done for “the people”.
> Well, you stand outside a society and a culture and realize that it is an invention and that you can improve it. Well, I like the American culture, such as it is, but let ‘s get rid of the fucking guns. —KV
So, it's relatively easy to find out that the US currently has about ~120 civilian firearms for every 100 people, but how does that number compare with whatever it was in 1999, when Vonnegut said the above?
Guns per person has gone up significantly. A wild guess might be 20-40%, but exact estimates are difficult. Sales are tracked and have gone way up, which is the starting point for estimating change in guns per person, but difficulty in estimating and combining all the factors makes it difficult to integrate.
(Most states don't track ownership, background checks aren't 1:1 with guns, gun purchase stats depending on how they're reported might include used guns, guns manufactured aren't necessarily going to civilians, and of course some guns are permanently lost or destroyed, or taken out of the country.)
Guns are of little use unless you have many tucked away in various locations, all loaded (ready for trigger pull). This principle is drilled into you when taking CCW training. I have several carries that will often cross paths. One for the trail, one for the glove box, for instance.
One is for wild hogs and one is for whatever bullshit happens at a random intersection (I live in an area that experiences significant amounts of random violence).
I'm far from a gun nut. I haven't fired a weapon in ten years, since I moved away from the farm. I bought my first pistol when I discovered motorcycle gang activity in my vacinity over twenty years ago. You never forget that warm feeling you get when you lose your vulnerability to the shine of a Ruger 357. The crazy part is that I didn't think it made me safe or helped the situation at all. I just decided it was better to have it out instead of getting cucked by some shitty gang member.
Young men get firearms for respect and dignity. In the inner city you have a lot of this, resulting in boys carrying guns they have never fired...until someone disrespects them enough. The cops should invite these boys to their $7MM firing range.
Hmm interesting I was under the impression that multiple locations with ready weapons was a newish thing(2000s), and before that it was either CCW all the time + home shotgun or don’t.
Either way, I see the logic. And I think it’s a good causal expansion behind the large per-capita ratio we got going on gun ownership.
For what it’s worth, I also contribute to this statistic.
It’s an excellent book to start with if you want to get an exposure to his way of working and his thinking.