It took me about 14 days to finish the Passage of Power, the latest Robert Caro book about the life and times of Lyndon Johnson - covering the years when he was Vice President and the first 2 years of his Presidency. I am working through this backwards since the next book was about the 10 years prior - when he was Majority Leader of the Senate.

The fourth book was pretty good - but I was curious about the frequent references Caro would make to a time when LBJ was immensely more powerful. As Senate Majority Leader, he was the most powerful person in the Senate, the smaller of the two Houses of the Congress. I thus picked up this book and started reading it November 11, 2016.

It has taken nearly two months for me to finish this book - and I was constantly reading it. It is the longest book that I have ever read, beating 1Q84 at 1,167 pages. Master of the Senate took Caro 12 years to write. It is worth every moment. There are moments in this book that simply blow me away.

It starts slowly with a long ramble about the US Senate. It discusses why the Senate exists and goes through the history of the Senate, especially why it is built the way it is and how that structure has been the cause of its own deterioriation. I listened to this while on a long drive and by the end of this long drive, I admitted that I was pretty sick and tired of the book. LBJ barely appears in it for the first 12 hours of the book - and it was a 53 hour long audiobook.

But once LBJ arrives, it stops becoming a rambling storybrook and becomes the most exciting, brilliant political thriller I have ever listened. House of Cards, but in reality. It goes through his rise to power in 1950 and culminates with the work that he has done in passing the Civil Rights Bill of 1957. The moments of his brilliance throughout this part of the story is the best thing that I have ever heard in any biography.

I really recommend that anyone with a passing interest in the halls of US power should read this book. It will change what you think about our world.