To Find Out More

When The Path to Power (New York: Knopf, 1982), the first volume of Robert Caro’s multivolume study The Years of Lyndon Johnson , appeared, critics deplored the author’s relentless hostility to his subject but applauded the vivid style. The second volume, Means of Ascent , appeared in March. For lively one-volume accounts, see Paul Conkin, Big Daddy from the Pedernales (Boston: Twayne, 1986), and Ronnie Dugger, The Politician (New York: Norton, 1982). Doris Kearns, in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper, 1976), offers a psychological analysis of a series of interviews with LBJ, whose memory is sometimes untrustworthy but never dull. For a more even-handed account than Caro’s, watch for the publication next year of the first installment of another multi-volume work on Johnson, by Robert Dallek (Oxford University Press).

—W.E.L.