Ready for some new year's reading? Here are the books that the Wonkblog team most enjoyed in 2012.
Neil Irwin
The Passage of Power, by Robert Caro
The fourth of what will be a five-part biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, Caro brings his seemingly inexhaustible research and reporting to bear on a moment when the American political landscape shifted inexorably. This volume covers Johnson's campaign for vice-president in 1960 and his unhappy time on the sidelines as VP, then the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson's ascent to the presidency, and the flurry of civil rights and other legislation enacted in the first months of the Johnson administration. The knuckle-gripping account of the events in Dallas in November 1963 is alone worth the price of admission, but the volume as a whole captures one of the great inflection points for America. It is to politics what "Mad Men" is to culture.
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