Master of the Senate by Robert A Caro

Master of the Senate by Robert A Caro

We've all heard about the classics and assume they're great. Some of us have even read them on our own. But for those of us who remain a bit intimidated or simply want to get more out of our reading, Crossway's Christian Guides to the Classics are here to help.

In these short guidebooks, popular professor, author, and literary expert Leland Ryken takes you through some of the greatest literature in history while answering your questions along the way.

Each book:

• Includes an introduction to the author and work
• Explains the cultural context
• Incorporates published criticism
• Contains discussion questions at the end of each unit of the text
• Defines key literary terms
• Lists resources for further study
• Evaluates the classic text from a Christian worldview

This guide opens up the last of Shakespeare's magnificent tragedies, Macbeth, and explores the themes of temptation, sin, and guilt, as well as the keys to virtuous behavior.

For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, has three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist. In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal, stating at the time: I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was twenty-two years old and just being mesmerized, and I'm sure it helped to shape how I think about politics. In 2016 he received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. The London Sunday Times has said that Caro is The greatest political biographer of our times.

Caro's first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, everywhere acclaimed as a modern classic, was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. It is, according to David Halberstam, Surely the greatest book ever written about a city. And The New York Times Book Review said: In the future, the scholar who writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort.

The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, was cited by The Washington Post as proof that we live in a great age of biography . . . [a book] of radiant excellence . . . Caro's evocation of the Texas Hill Country, his elaboration of Johnson's unsleeping ambition, his understanding of how politics actually work, are--let it be said flat out--at the summit of American historical writing. Professor Henry F. Graff of Columbia University called the second volume, Means of Ascent, brilliant. No review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is nothing less than how present-day politics was born. The London Times hailed volume three, Master of the Senate, as a masterpiece . . . Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age. The Passage of Power, volume four, has been called Shakespearean . . . A breathtakingly dramatic story [told] with consummate artistry and ardor (The New York Times) and as absorbing as a political thriller . . . By writing the best presidential biography the country has ever seen, Caro has forever changed the way we think about, and read, American history (NPR). On the cover of The New York Times Book Review, President Bill Clinton praised it as Brilliant . . . Important . . . Remarkable. With this fascinating and meticulous account Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.

Caro has a unique place among American political biographers, The Boston Globe said . . . He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured. And Nicholas von Hoffman wrote: Caro has changed the art of political biography.

Born and raised in New York City, Caro graduated from Princeton University, was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, the historian and writer.