From Booklist
Until Robert Caro completes his multivolume opus, Dallek's two-volume LBJ biography is the best one available. Dallek's work reflects impressive detachment toward a figure about whom few were neutral, least of all LBJ himself. He inherited an elevated sense of self, according to Dallek, who describes the Johnson family's relatively high place on the local social ladder despite their poverty. But LBJ's ego was strangely fragile and self-pitying, and in the conclusion, Dallek questions, after narrating the fateful decisions to escalate the Vietnam conflict, Johnson's "capacity to make rational life and death decisions." He lived and conducted politics as a personal enterprise, as Dallek's account of LBJ's wheeling-and-dealing rise from congressional aide to president illustrates. On the un-seamy side, Dallek credits LBJ's personal experience with poverty as a motive in his championing the social and civil rights enactments of the 1960s. In Dallek's hands, Johnson is complex, deceitful, and idealistic, and the author shows why the man's legacy, both positive and negative, will always command interest and debate. Gilbert Taylor
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Booklist
"Dallek's work reflects impressive detachment toward a figure about whom few were neutral, least of all LBJ himself."


Library Journal
"This abridgement of Dallek's masterly two-volume biography, Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant, is a welcome addition."


Book Description
Robert Dallek's brilliant two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has received an avalanche of praise. Michael Beschloss, in The Los Angeles Times, said that it "succeeds brilliantly." The New York Times called it "rock solid" and The Washington Post hailed it as "invaluable." And Sidney Blumenthal in The Boston Globe wrote that it was "dense with astonishing incidents." Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what is surely the finest one-volume biography of Johnson available. Based on years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill country to the White House. We see LBJ, in the House and the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Then, in the White House, we see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam. In these pages Johnson emerges as a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this singular biography reveals both the greatness and the tangled complexities of one of the most extravagant characters ever to step onto the presidential stage.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Robert Dallek's brilliant two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has received an avalanche of praise. Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what is surely the finest one-volume biography of Johnson available. Based on years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill country to the White House. We see LBJ, in the House and the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Then, in the White House, we see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam. In these pages Johnson emerges as a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this singular biography reveals both the greatness and the tangled complexities of one of the most extravagant characters ever to step onto the presidential stage.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal