Knight's Reading List II: February 2007

In February 2007 I finished reading the following books:

Caro, Robert A. Master of the Senate. 2002. xxiv + 1167 pages. Includes Selected Bibliography, Notes, Index. Volume 3 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Drake, David A. Other Times than Peace. 2006. 331 pages.

O’Brian, Patrick. H. M. S. Surprise. 1971. 379 pages.

Other Times than Peace is a collection of Drake’s stories in various warlike settings, going back nearly 30 years. For those who don’t know, David Drake is a lawyer and Vietnam veteran who has written a very large amount of fantasy and science fiction. His sensibilities are stark. His imagery is informed by his personal experience of war. I am pleased to be able to count Dave as a friend. Those of you who read the eleven stories in this volume may discern some of the reasons I value Dave as a friend, and as an author of solid, engaging prose.

I spoke of Patrick O’Brian in the context of one of the books in my January 2007 list, Post Captain. Although H. M. S. Surprise follows in the series – O’Brian did no flashbacks: the publication order of the books and the ostensible chronological order of the events described in them are the same, it certainly stands on its own as a novel. O’Brian doesn’t waste a lot of time recounting what has occurred in previous works.

Someone commented that O’Brian was better than C. S. Forester at putting himself into the mind of an eighteenth-century man. Indeed, having read both the Hornblower and the Aubrey-Maturin novels complete, I can attest that Hornblower is a 20th century man – someone Forester might have known, placed in scenes of the early 19th century. Jack Aubrey, the commander of H. M. S. Surprise, has much more of an 18th century mind. This is probably due to O’Brian’s reliance on the journals and letters of contemporary sea officers as a source for language and incident.

Looking at these two books as fictional presentations of men at war, the main difference between Drake and O’Brian, in my opinion, is that Drake’s characters tend to be haunted by the expedients to which they are forced. O’Brian’s have a greater ability to sit down with some wine, music, and toasted cheese, and let bygones be bygones.

Master of the Senate is the third volume in Robert Caro’s amazing biography of Lyndon Johnson. The project has already taken a few decades of Mr. Caro’s time, and I don’t know if he will outlive its completion. I had read the first two volumes – The Path to Power* and Means of Ascent** – years ago, when they were published, but I re-read them both before starting Master of the Senate. I was reading Robert Caro for a year, from February 2006 until February 2007. By the end, I felt as if I knew Lyndon Johnson as well as it is possible for one human being to know another. Caro is both critical of Johnson’s weaknesses, and some of his strengths, but in Master of the Senate he is portraying Johnson as a man in the perfect milieu. Had Johnson not been driven to become President, his mastery of the people and the institutions that are the United States Senate would have been the hallmark of his career.

This is, by the way, more than a biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro brings together a number of strands to form this story. He gives a brief, but very informative, history of the Senate itself, and the manner in which it had become a very powerful obstacle to social change. He provides a summary biography of Richard Russell of Georgia, a complex and powerful man. And, by using the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as the focus of the work, he reveals much about American society and its institutions at a time when it was under great pressure to change. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, for all its faults, showed Lyndon Johnson's ability to understand the forces at work in the Senate, and beyond, and to bring about a surprising result, and one with implications beyond the apparent.

* The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume I: The Path to Power. 1981, 1982. 882 pages.
** The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume II: Means of Ascent. 1990. 522 pages.