An Interview with Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut (1999)
robertcaro.org
robertcaro.org
It’s an excellent book to start with if you want to get an exposure to his way of working and his thinking.
Ever since finishing them, I have been on the hunt for historical biographies of similar quality. While I haven't found any that match up completely, here are a few that come close in my opinion:
* Truman by David McCullough
* Grant by Ron Chernow
* American Caesar by William Manchester
I've also read the three-part Churchill series by Manchester, but it didn’t quite measure up to the LBJ series for me.
If you have any other suggestions, please share them!
My brother in law loves Vonnegut, I read all of his books also. Personally, I don't understand the appeal
My favorite recent biography was on both JCR Licklider and the world he helped create; 'The Dream Machine', Waldrop.
Even more abstract, 'The Prize', Yergin, might be called a biography of the oil industry and 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is a biograpy of that dread beast. Those were my favorite books before starting Caro.
It's slow to start as the Romans fight the same Veientes a hundred times over, but when it's good, it's really good.
The stories are historic so there are realistic lessons in them. It's interesting as a working class person to read how the plebs were able to take some power from the owning class, for example.
The battles are tactical. The heroes are epic. The highs are very high and the lows very low.
Anyways it was preserved on paper 2000 years for a reason. It's unbelievably good.
The interviews at the end of each episode is super insightful about how the structures of power continue to operate in the current day.
They really need to publish this in ebook form. It's so hard to read as a real book because of the size, and the only other way is audiobook.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker#Reception>
(I'd thought it had been serialised, per a recent New Yorker Radio Our podcast episode, but Wikipedia suggests just only sections were published.)
Serialisation remains one of the more viable ways of making long works accessible, as well as financing their creation.
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/jane-jacobs-missing-chapt...
One of my favorite insights, ever.
I also like the line in there or Vonnegut and Caro agree that 4 to 5 hours a day is the max you can truly focus.
LBJ was a despicable human being in many ways. But, he truly believed in civil rights and making life better for ordinary people. Caro captures the toil of the hill country farm wife and the oppression of Mexican-Texans — and what Johnson did for them — vividly.
Moses was almost the opposite. He built an idealist vision in the 1920s… and never evolved. As his power peaked, he did not understand why people were against him after what he had done for “the people”.
"Novelists are famous as being lousy mates, whether males or females, and one reason is that they have to concentrate all the time or they’ll lose the thread of the novel. It’s all in the head, and they have information pouring in from the outside they’re going to lose and so they will pretend to hear you, but they’re really some- where else."
Later on he says...
"It’s nowhere else and so they don’t want to lose it and if you interrupt a novelist it’s a disaster for him."
Maybe software developers and novelists have some inner workings in common!
Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26018824 - Feb 2021 (46 comments)
So, it's relatively easy to find out that the US currently has about ~120 civilian firearms for every 100 people, but how does that number compare with whatever it was in 1999, when Vonnegut said the above?
Guns per person has gone up significantly. A wild guess might be 20-40%, but exact estimates are difficult. Sales are tracked and have gone way up, which is the starting point for estimating change in guns per person, but difficulty in estimating and combining all the factors makes it difficult to integrate.
(Most states don't track ownership, background checks aren't 1:1 with guns, gun purchase stats depending on how they're reported might include used guns, guns manufactured aren't necessarily going to civilians, and of course some guns are permanently lost or destroyed, or taken out of the country.)
Gun collecting now can become a hobby itself, owning many different variants of ARs, Glocks, 1911 clones, etc.
Add to that the new thing of owning a gun PER location. SO CCW + Car Gun + House Gun.
It can add up quite quickly. Even for your "average" gun owner.
One is for wild hogs and one is for whatever bullshit happens at a random intersection (I live in an area that experiences significant amounts of random violence).
I'm far from a gun nut. I haven't fired a weapon in ten years, since I moved away from the farm. I bought my first pistol when I discovered motorcycle gang activity in my vacinity over twenty years ago. You never forget that warm feeling you get when you lose your vulnerability to the shine of a Ruger 357. The crazy part is that I didn't think it made me safe or helped the situation at all. I just decided it was better to have it out instead of getting cucked by some shitty gang member.
Young men get firearms for respect and dignity. In the inner city you have a lot of this, resulting in boys carrying guns they have never fired...until someone disrespects them enough. The cops should invite these boys to their $7MM firing range.
Either way, I see the logic. And I think it’s a good causal expansion behind the large per-capita ratio we got going on gun ownership.
For what it’s worth, I also contribute to this statistic.