Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World Book

I can't remember the last time I was so glad to have finished a book. Clearly, this is an award-winning work with lots of glowing reviews. From about the middle of the book on, it was a slog to get through. I won't say the book itself is bad, as it was meticulously researched and written. I think it's more a case of what I was expecting, and what I instead got from this that caused the problem.

What I expected:

1. I wanted to know TR as a human being: personal, professional, spiritual, social.

2. I wanted to understand his family life.

3. I wanted a flavor for the times in which he lived. I wanted to know what it was like to live in the mid-to-late 1800s in America.

4. I wanted to be entertained. I wanted to learn something. I wanted to be moved. What do all of us want when we pick up a book? This is one of our best known presidents. Ideally, I wanted to come away with a great respect and admiration for the subject.

What I got:

1. If you're familiar with the Seinfeld episode about the "minutia", then I could stop this review right here. The book started with so much promise. I thought I was getting everything in my list. I was so happy to have been recommended this book. This lasted for a couple hundred pages, when TR's young life was covered. I wasn't getting a good flavor for the times, but it seemed we could be headed in that direction. Wrong.

2. If you are a hunter and can picture yourself literally dancing with glee after shooting an animal (TR actually did this after shooting his first buffalo. I have to say, he lost a lot of my respect at that point. I can appreciate people who hunt for meat, even though I wouldn't do it unless I was actually starving. But to dance with glee after shooting an animal with a rifle? Takes it a bit far, sorry), then by all means read this book. You will get LOTS, and I do mean lots, of detail about every animal he shot: where the bullet went in, where it came out, in some cases where the bullet went after exiting, information in short that no one wants to know. Really, does even the most avid sportsman want to hear this? I ask you. There were whole chapters devoted to hunting details. Not kidding.

3. You will get chapter and verse and verse and verse about every job he took, and almost what he did every day at that job. I'm really not exaggerating. Details at the level that you'd be totally uninterested unless you were writing an assigned paper about TR. And even then, I don't think even the scholars are interested in that level of minutia.

4. The Spanish-American war was covered. I still don't understand why this happened and what was the real end result. Really? In a book with so much pointless detail, you can't give the reader a real understanding of this conflict? It would only take a paragraph or two. I'm not looking to write an article about it, but a good basic understanding would be nice in a book over 900 pages long. I came in with no understanding, so perhaps the intended audience already had an understanding of that war. Ok, fine. But we got tons and tons of totally pointless detail about hills, ridges. You talk about missing the forest for the trees. Classic case right here.

5. Once he marries, you get virtually nothing about his family life, how he relates to his wife and kids. Almost zilch. This was a big surprise to me.

So that about sums it up. Never write a sentence when a whole chapter (or multiple chapters) would do. If the details were interesting, fine. I expect lots of interesting detail in a book this long; in fact, that's what I'm looking for. Morris ran out of interesting a couple hundred pages in. I'd give this book one star but for the promising, engaging beginning.