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A civil war over semicolons: Robert Caro and his editor
- yuppie_scum 4y ago“The Power Broker” by Caro is a must-read.
- voisin 4y agoIt is an excellent book but I think it could have an abridged version for the vast majority of people who don’t need the crazy amount of minutiae in it. I found sections riveting, but in between I struggled with boredom - not every single meeting and letter and interaction is important!
- throw0101c 4y ago> It is an excellent book but I think it could have an abridged version for the vast majority of people who don’t need the crazy amount of minutiae in it. From the article: > There would be other battles, like the one over a long section on the history of grass in Texas Hill Country, in the first volume of the Johnson biography, that Gottlieb wanted to cut—“a tremendous battle, an angry, angry battle” is how Caro, who ended up on the losing side, describes it.
- hardwaregeek 4y agoI disagree. All the details matter. The book is an epic story closer to a Tolstoy novel than a mere biography. It’s about a city and a man’s impact on the city. It’s about all of the people whose lives he benefited and whose lives he ruined. Without that sense of scale, the ending doesn’t work. You don’t have time to build sympathy for Moses and to slowly lose that sympathy. And to finally finish with that conflicted love, hate, pity, and awe that I left the book with.
- voisin 4y ago> The book is an epic story closer to a Tolstoy novel than a mere biography. It’s about a city and a man’s impact on the city. It’s about all of the people whose lives he benefited and whose lives he ruined. Without that sense of scale, the ending doesn’t work. You don’t have time to build sympathy for Moses and to slowly lose that sympathy. And to finally finish with that conflicted love, hate, pity, and awe that I left the book with. I don’t disagree with any of this. > All the details matter. This is where we disagree. I think 30-50% of the book could be cut and you’d still be able to accomplish everything in the first quote above.
- hardwaregeek 4y agoOkay I will concede that Caro loves his grand sweeping intro in which he explains that this chapter will outline how Moses evolved in the 30’s, then explain in very close detail how this change happens, then have a grand sweeping recap about how these changes happened and what it meant. It is a lot, but I kind of love this baroque, over the top style.
- pessimizer 4y agoWhat's the necessity of making biographies read like fiction?
- hardwaregeek 4y agoThey’re really really fun to read? Real life can be dramatic too.
- kingkawn 4y agoThe details of building and wielding power is the point of the series.
- tasseff 4y agoInterestingly, no Kindle version of The Power Broker is available, although there were reports in 2021 that one was purchasable on Amazon for a very short time [1]. I really dislike handling large books, especially if I'm reading in a casual setting. Because of this, I decided to start reading The Years of Lyndon Johnson series instead, which do have Kindle versions. [1] https://www.curbed.com/2021/07/power-broker-caro-ebook-knopf-amazon.html https://www.curbed.com/2021/07/power-broker-caro-ebook-knopf...
- RoboTeddy 4y agoOne strategy I’ve seen employee is to tear the book into three parts.
- misiti3780 4y agoI have an epub if you want it.
- gaws 4y agoIf it's the epub passed around different corners of the web, then it's not worth sharing. The formatting is garbage. One is better off reading the book in print.
- misiti3780 4y agoI read the book on my kindle using it, format seemed fine to me.
- dinkleberg 4y agoIf you like audio books, I'd definitely recommend listening to his books. I find these epic length books much easier to get through in audio form.
- twoodfin 4y agoAgree. The Audible versions of The Power Broker and the LBJ books have excellent narration.
- tuatoru 4y agoThere is nothing better than semicolons as a casus belli.
- 082349872349872 4y agoHow about semicolons as a casus amoris? I like dem clauses; I cannot lie.
- thfuran 4y agoBut clauses, best joined with commas, rarely need semicolons.
- 082349872349872 4y agoUnfortunately métrique oblige, and "independent clauses" had three syllables too many :-( My anaconda don´t want none Unless your verb's done, hon. — Sir Puncts-A-Lot (on the pluperfect?)
- dmitryminkovsky 4y agoOxford commas?
- Wistar 4y agoThis past week, NPR’s Fresh Air ran a quite good interview with Caro’s editor, Robert Gottlieb. At 91, he seems incredibly sharp. https://www.npr.org/2023/01/03/1146641641/robert-gottlieb-caro-power-broker-turn-every-page-lizzie-gottlieb https://www.npr.org/2023/01/03/1146641641/robert-gottlieb-ca...
- hypersoar 4y agoI hope so! The two of them have an enormous book to finish.
- blueridge 4y agoAlso read: https://archive.ph/JzSiI https://archive.ph/JzSiI Robert Gottlieb: Avid Reader, Reluctant Writer Mr. Gottlieb has been the editorial midwife to works by writers like Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Robert Caro. In his new memoir, he writes about the editing life.
- no_wizard 4y agoFor a moment I thought this was the no-semi movement (standard JS) in the JS community at it again. Then realized The Atlantic probably isn’t covering the code style debate
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tasseff 4y agoI recently started reading the The Years of Lyndon Johnson and desperately want to see the documentary mentioned in the article, Turn Every Page. Alas, it doesn't seem to be playing anywhere near me [1]. Maybe other people reading will have a chance. [1] https://dx35vtwkllhj9.cloudfront.net/sonypicturesclassics/turn-every-page-the-adventures-of-robert-caro-and-robert-gottlieb/images/release-schedules/tepReleaseSchedule.pdf https://dx35vtwkllhj9.cloudfront.net/sonypicturesclassics/tu...
- misiti3780 4y agoI read it last year, I started in September 1st and didnt finish the "last" page until mid January, reading multiple hours a day. I read a lot of historical biographies, I have never read anything as good about a president most people dont care about. I thought book 3 was the best, everyone should read the first 300 pages just to understand how and why congress works the way it does today.
- ghaff 4y agoLBJ's accomplishments were mostly in Congress like the passing of the Civil Rights Act. As a president, today he's mostly remembered as the president who succeeded JFK and got further wrapped up in the Vietnam War.
- Aloha 4y agoIndeed, we're still living in the society he tried to create. I wish he'd been more successful.
- superposeur 4y agoAgree that 3 is great. My favorite is 1, which is next-level even by the high Caro standard: moving to the hill country? Finding un-censored copies of LBJ's yearbook? Unearthing his affair with Alice Glass and the tales of family conflict from his brother? The manic ambition of his first Congressional race as related by his driver? The secret, crucial influence of Brown&Root? -- WTF, no other writer in a thousand years could have written that book. Also, I'll put in a plug for 2, which in my opinion is sorely underrated.
- hardwaregeek 4y agoOkay I get that Gottlieb and Caro were probably right to edit down the Power Broker or remove an expansive passage on grass, but dammit I would totally read an unedited version of The Power Broker. Caro’s writing is brilliant, powerful work and I can’t get enough of it. He just needs to finish. Please Bob. Finish the damn series.
- hypersoar 4y agoCaro tragically had to cut a chapter about Moses's fight with Jane Jacobs from the book. His initial manuscript was a million(!) words. He managed to cut it down to a trim 700,000. For comparison, the longest Song of Ice and Fire novel is 500,000. Fortunately, he's handing all of his papers over to the New York Historical Society. I can only imagine how many books worth of gold is there to mined by future authors. The NYT had a great article about it a couple years ago (to the day, as it happens): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/nyregion/robert-caro-archives.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/nyregion/robert-caro-arch...
- RoboTeddy 4y agoCaro understands his subjects so so well that you feel you are inside their heads. Caro’s works have spoiled me — other biographies feel out-of-focus and surface-level and speculative. (And all this despite the fact that Caro isn’t even really focusing directly on his subjects, because actually his books are about power and its dynamics.)
- misiti3780 4y agoI agree, I remember in the LBJ books he spent hundreds of pages talking about Richard Russell, Coke Stevenson, and Sam Rayburn -- As I was reading, I was thinking "Why is he writing a biography within a biography on these people?". Once you get to the end, it all makes sense. I really hope we get that 5th book.
- mynameishere 4y agoJust as a side note, I remember an interview with Caro in which he discusses Dick Russell with a very obvious hatred that does not come across in the book. I don't know if it developed over time or if the book is disingenuously "even-handed" or what.
- barry-cotter 4y agoFor the ignorant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Russell_Jr https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Russell_Jr. Richard Brevard Russell Jr. (November 2, 1897 – January 21, 1971) was an American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 66th Governor of Georgia from 1931 to 1933 before serving in the United States Senate for almost 40 years, from 1933 to 1971. Russell was a founder and leader of the conservative coalition that dominated Congress from 1937 to 1963, and at his death was the most senior member of the Senate.[1][2] He was for decades a leader of Southern opposition to the civil rights movement.[3]
- woodruffw 4y agoIf you like Caro’s approach to biography, I suggest Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg is much better known for his poetry, but I found his style and attention to detail engrossing in the same way that Caro usually is.
- Pigalowda 4y agoI kinda wish I had a best frenemy. Maybe that’s part of their longevity. Sure, you need a friend, but maybe to live a long time what you really need is an enemy.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago[flagged]
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago[flagged]
- BuckyBeaver 4y agoKeep lashing out at facts. What's the matter?
- robocat 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- BuckyBeaver 4y agoI know, right? You'd think there'd be something about posting meaningful headlines instead of being intentionally obscure.
- oxfeed65261 4y agohttps://archive.ph/l8f6p https://archive.ph/l8f6p
- motohagiography 4y agoI sympathize. In another life I wrote for a newspaper occasionally, and I gave it up because I didn't have copy approval, and the voice I wrote in vs. the voice they published were sufficiently different to me that I preferred to just not write if that was how it was reflected. However, the beauty of an editor/writer relationship is that the writer is who they are, and a good editor understands what readers like about them. These are rarely the same thing. I couldn't read anything I wrote after it was published, as if it were possible to die of cringe, I probably would have. They (it was a newspaper, their sub editors could have been anyone, and often I thought they most certainly were) knew their readership and what kept readers reading, and they managed my conceits like pros, because that's literally what they did for a living. This argument over semicolons, however, looks like a straight power struggle. A semicolon is what a writer uses to connect two poorly formed ideas to affect a single good one. Even as a writer, I would only ever expect to get one semicolon in the course of the entire relationship, and if I picked that hill to die on, the only situation I would bet it on would be the single idea I was known for - like taking down a sitting president, or the reasoned confidence my turn of phrase would turn the course of history. Otherwise, it's a domestic dispute. I have an exchange in my email from some years ago about a letter I sent to the Financial Times where, when they published it, the post-edit version was so off that I sincerely explained to the editor that my original phrasing was a reference to a common colloquialism, with the implication that I thought that english was not the editor's first language. She was as impressed by this as you can imagine, explaining back that she was in fact an accomplished athlete in the sport I was referencing. The ensuing thread should probably go down in writer/editor lore. As a writer, of course I would think that. It's why dealing with that sort of thing is a job. For similar reasons, I am waiting for an editor die-off at The Economist before attempting to be on assignment for them again. Those people live forever.