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by Robert A. Caro
From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, deeply revealing recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed books.
For the first time in book form, Robert Caro gives us a glimpse into his own life and work in these evocatively written, personal pieces. He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses; what it felt like to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses' Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ's mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of working in solitude, he found a writers' community at the New York Public Library, and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books.
Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences - some previously published, some written expressly for this book - bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.
BookBrowsers ask Donna Everhart, author of Women of a Promiscuous Nature
What's really strange is if my company had not gone bankrupt in late 2008, I'd probably still be there (or retired) working in Information Tech. (I think I saw this is your background too - so I know you know how intense that environment can be) I worked in IT from 1977 until 2012. I'd made a dec...
-Donna_Everhart
What's your favorite banned book?
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, published in 1974 and adapted into a movie in 1988. The themes were about conformity and bullying in a Catholic high school setting. Great YA book, even if it was written 50 years ago it's very relevant. While working in the IT Department of a large, rural Nor...
-BlueRidgeJeanne
"Starred Review. Caro's skill as a biographer, master of compelling prose, appealing self-deprecation, and overall generous spirit shine through on every page." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. [T]his lively combination of memoir and non-fiction writing will help sate their appetite for new writing from Caro until the arrival of his final, still-in-progress Johnson biography." - Publishers Weekly
This information about Working was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, twice won the National Book Award, three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Francis Parkman Prize. In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal. Caro graduated from Princeton, was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. He lives with his wife, the writer Ina Caro, in New York City, where he is at work on the fifth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
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