Having said many times over the years, and written it into the title of his books, that his central subject is power, a chapter such as “The Sad Irons” works as an extension of this project. Part of Caro’s appeal is his expansive vision of history, but in his philosophy this never means straying from the book’s subject. Caro writes at length about the back-breaking labor involved in the chores these women carried out daily in order to establish what a difference it made when Johnson used his influence to get electricity run to the Hill Country for the first time. My favorite chapter in The Path to Power is “The Sad Irons”, which details the life of housewives in the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up. A particularly enlightening passage in The Path To Power uses handwritten notes from Johnson to piece together the flow of money from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as directed by Johnson, to candidates with whom he curried favor. Soon I had ordered a physical copy along with the rest of the books in the series, which I finished in a few months.Ĭaro’s meticulous research methods, long supported by the labor of his wife Ina Caro, are evident in the many passages of his work that trace a narrative gleaned mostly from archival materials. I downloaded the audiobook, which is about forty hours long, and at first listened on long walks around the University of Georgia campus (this was when I was still living in Athens). I read a little bit about Caro and his approach and decided to try the first book in the series, The Path to Power, for myself. Caro when my dad picked up the fourth and most recent volume of his Years of Lyndon Johnson series, The Passage of Power. I first encountered the work of Robert A.

The power broker by robert a caro