Robert A. Caro

"Short autobiography about author's processes of researching, interviewing, and writing his books"--

Researching, Interviewing, Writing

Working

Maria Buitrago

 So it's easy to fool your- self that you're really working hard when you're not. And I'm naturally lazy. So what I do is-people laugh at me-I put on a jacket and a tie to come to work, because when I was young, everybody wore jackets and ties to work, and I want to remind myself that I'm going to a job. I have to produce. I write down how many words I've done in a day. Not to the word— I count the lines. I do it as we used to do it in the newspaper business, ten words to a line. I do a lot of little things to try to make  me remember it's a job.

CARO: The boiling down entails writing those paragraphs over maybe... I can't even tell you how many times, over and over and over. The whole time, I'm saying to myself, No, that's not exactly what you're trying to do in this book.

You have to ask yourself, Are you making the reader see the scene? And that means, Can you see the scene? You look at so many books, and it seems like all the writer cares about is getting the facts in. But the facts alone aren't enough. 

Interviews: silence is the weapon, silence and people's need to fill it-as long as the person isn't you, the interviewer. Two of fiction's greatest interviewers — Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret and John le Carré's George Smiley—have little devices they use to keep themselves from talking, and let silence do its work. Maigret cleans his ever-present pipe, tapping it gently on his desk and then scraping it out until the witness breaks down and talks. Smiley takes off his eyeglasses and polishes them with the thick end of his necktie. As for myself, I have less class. When I'm waiting for the person I'm interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write "SU" (for Shut Up!) in my notebook. If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of "SUs" there.

Patrick Book

Robert Caro is a goddamn delight. This was brief but so wonderful. It’s probably heretical to say it, but it makes me want him to finish his memoirs even more than the last LBJ book.

Keven Wang

Masterpiece. I sincerely hope we get to read his autobiography

brendan sudol

This book feels like an amazing life hack. You get to experience Caro’s brilliant writing and catch a glimpse of the fascinating stories of Robert Moses and LBJ and the worlds they shaped, and it’s all in a fraction of the pages to Caro’s typical tomes.

I was continually astounded by his writing process and commitment to his craft. One example: Caro writes his first drafts (and often second and thirds) with pen and paper! (It helps him slow down and think things through)

Audrey Kalman

Abby Byers

Steven Ovadia

It's interesting hearing his work processes but he doesn't dig too deep nor get into details. Still, it provided nice summaries of The Power Broker and the LBJ books, so it was a tremendous time-saver :-)

Michael Hessling

Wonderful stories. I’ve a serious desire to restart The Power Broker and read the LBJ books.

Seyfeddin Başsaraç

“One of the great reporters of our time and probably the greatest biographer.” —The Sunday Times (London) From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, deeply moving recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed books. Now in paperback, Robert Caro gives us a glimpse into his own life and work in these evocatively written, personal pieces. He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses and to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses' Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ's mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of working in solitude, he found a writers' community at the New York Public Library, and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books. Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences--some previously published, some written expressly for this book--bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.

Florence

Mat Connor

Andrew Louis

Ben Roberts

Phil Halley

"Turn every page" -- Robert Moses. The city-shaper ; Carbon footprint ; Sanctum sanctorum for writers -- Lyndon Johnson. LBJA ; "Why can't you do a biography of Napoleon?" ; Interviewing. "I lied under oath" : Luis Salas ; "Hell, no, he's not dead" : Vernon Whiteside ; "It's all there in black and white" : Ella So Relle ; "I wanted to be a citizen" : Margaret and David Frost ; "My eyes were just out on stems" : Lady Bird Johnson ; Tricks of the trade -- A sense of place -- Two songs -- The Paris Review interview.

Working Researching, Interviewing, Writing

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