Robert Dallek's outstanding two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has got an avalanche of compliment. Michael Beschloss, in The la Times, stated that it "succeeds brilliantly." The manhattan Times referred to as it "rock reliable" and The Washington Post hailed it as "invaluable." And Sidney Blumenthal in The Boston Globe wrote that it was once "dense with staggering incidents."

Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what's definitely the best one-volume biography of Johnson on hand. in response to years of analysis in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, in addition to various own interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill nation to the White residence. We see LBJ, in the home and the Senate, whirl his method via 16- and eighteen-hour days, speaking, urging, tough, achieving for impact and gear, in an uncommonly winning congressional profession. Then, within the White condo, we see Johnson because the visionary chief who labored his will on Congress like no president sooner than or on account that, enacting a number of an important laws, from Medicare and environmental security to the main major advances in civil rights for black americans ever accomplished. And we see the intensity of Johnson's deepest ache as he grew to become more and more ensnared in Vietnam.

In those pages Johnson emerges as a guy of towering depth and anguished lack of confidence, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a guy who was once outstanding, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, pushed: "A twister in pants." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this