Robert Caro

The Power Broker is the best biography I have ever read. Let's get that out of the way first. And I've read, and loved, a lot of biographies. But never have I come away from a book with such a strong feeling of knowledge of its subject. Robert Moses was a most amazing figure, a strong-arm character, a conniver, a dreamer, very much the power broker as the title says. He built big, and often terribly wrong. I don't think I would have liked him as a human being. I've often wondered if author Robert Caro felt likewise.

After Robert Moses, Caro went on to Lyndon Baines Johnson, a similar figure in many ways, especially in the manipulation of power. I read the first volume, and I've been waiting for Caro to finish ever since, but every time a new volume comes out, it is not the last. I've given up. I'm going to get the ones that are out there on my Kindle and have done with it. By the time I'm finished with them, with any luck the final volume will be out. The (presumably) penultimate volume is coming out in a few weeks.

But, well, that Kindle... There's the rub. Publishing is changing these days, and the Grinwout is in the thick of it. Publishers don't really know where they're going with digital products, but they're going there a mile a minute. One fear is that we are creating a business of publishing—fast and electronic—that will no longer be able to support garganutan projects like Caro's LBJ biography. And the world will be a lesser place for it, if that is true.

[Knopf editor Sonny Mehta] pulls each of Caro's books off his shelf, The Power Broker and the first three Johnson volumes. He stacks them on his desk like blocks, resting his hand on top of the pile, saving a place for the next one. "I can't imagine this being done or even attempted by anyone else," Mehta says, almost to himself. "He's given over so much of his life to another guy." It's not just Caro's single-mindedness that makes repeating The Years of Lyndon Johnson a modern impossibility... Books like Caro's don't make corporate sense anymore, if they ever did. They require not just staggering investments of time but also of money, of jet fuel and paper and cloth. There will be five books now rather than four — and in the beginning, there were meant to be three — partly because they became victims of their own physical scale.

This is from a profile of Caro by Chris Jones in the May 2012 Esquire, The Big Book. It is required reading for anyone who cares about words, and how they are disseminated.