What does it mean to devote your life to one book? Yesterday, I spoke about the figure of the freelancer turned man of letters, who spends his career moving from subject to subject like a shark, but this tells us nothing about a man like Robert Caro, who has spent his entire life writing about two subjects, and for the past forty years only one, the life of Lyndon Johnson. What was originally expected to run three volumes has now expanded to four, with a fifth on the way, covering something like 3,500 pages, with most of Johnson’s presidency yet to come. As Charles McGrath points out in a recent profile in the New York Times, Caro has now spent more time writing about the crucial years of Lyndon Johnson’s life than Johnson spent living them. At first glance, then, Caro might seem like the opposite of the kind of writer I’ve described. But when you look more closely, as Caro himself would, you find surprising affinities.

If Caro has mostly turned aside from other kinds of work, it wasn’t because he didn’t need it—McGrath’s profile notes that Caro and his wife sold their house in Long Island and moved to the Bronx to save money during the writing of his first book. Instead, Caro’s singlemindedness seems inspired by both his own meticulous personality and an almost fanatical sense of progressive revelation, the idea that looking closely enough at one life can allow us to understand an entire society, but only if we dig as deeply as possible. And it helps, of course, that he has chosen subjects that lend themselves to such expansiveness. As McGrath points out, The Years of Lyndon Johnson encompasses everything from detailed miniature biographies of secondary characters like Sam Rayburn or Hubert Humphrey to a history of the United States Senate, all of which Caro furnishes for the sake of necessary context. In short, like any author, he constantly follows his curiosity into unexpected places—he’s just lucky enough to be able to encompass it under one larger theme.

I haven’t read all of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, although those three big volumes have been staring down imposingly from my bookshelves for a long time now, but I have read The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, which remains one of my fondest memories from a lifetime of reading nonfiction. It’s about as big, physically, as a book can be and still fit between two covers, but it’s a marvel of pacing and detail—the reader’s interest never flags—and we can almost believe Caro when he says that he cut 350,000 words and still regrets every one. (The real hero of McGrath’s piece is editor Robert Gottlieb.) Caro clearly takes his cues from Gibbon, an edition of which is visible in his office, and like Gibbon, his life has been consumed by one great work, to an extent that seems to have taken even his loved ones by surprise. “I never thought this would be all he’d write about,” his wife Ina says. “I’ve always wanted him to finish a novel.”

But of course, Caro has already written his novel, or novels, which are buried throughout his larger work. (Just one example out of many: the account in The Power Broker of the relationship between Robert Moses and his brother Paul, which reads like a self-contained tragedy.) Every story unfolds into others, and episodes that were originally conceived as a single chapter end up taking up most of a book. In this sense, Caro’s approach really is Homeric: in the Iliad, there are passages of a couple of lines in the surviving text that, when originally sung, could be expanded by the performer to last for hours, based on the interests of the audience. Similarly, there are times when Caro’s work reads like a standard biography of Johnson in which each paragraph has been expanded in every imaginable direction. Like Thomas Mann, Caro knows that only the exhaustive is truly interesting. And its pursuit is, in every sense, the work of a lifetime.

At the end of his Tuesday night speech at the City University of New York, Robert Caro pointed to his wristwatch and joked that he’d run over his allotted time, a trait that showed why “I always write thousand-page books.” Judging from the applause, I doubt many people noticed he’d gone into overtime — or even cared if they had.

The theme of Caro’s speech, delivered before a capacity crowd at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, was the importance of conveying a sense of place in writing biography. As the author of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, and the ongoing Brobdingnagian chronicle The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro certainly has the credentials to show how biography should be done.

Interestingly, when Caro illustrated the need for a sense of place he cited examples from fiction: Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace; Herman Melville’s account of a dead whale being systematically taken apart by whalers in Moby-Dick; and Dickens’ depiction of Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations, a mansion turned into a mausoleum for the hopes that died when she was jilted by her suitor. It served as a reminder that Caro is a contemporary of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and other New Journalism figures who brought literary techniques to their reportage, though I could hardly think of great books with less in common than The Power Broker and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, or Means of Ascent and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

What Caro went on to demonstrate was the power of storytelling grounded in deep, painstaking research. Anyone hoping for a taste of the fourth and (Caro says) final Johnson volume went away disappointed: Caro concentrated on his time spent in the Texas hill country, where he got a feel for the loneliness, isolation, and poverty that wracked Johnson’s youth. Caro noted that when he started his Johnson research, there were already seventeen books about the controversial president, and he had read “Johnson grew up poor” so many times he thought he already knew most of what he needed. Only by going to the hill country and imagining what it would be like to live in a place where the essentials of life had to be dug, chopped, and hauled across miles of rugged landscape.

Particularly spooky was Caro’s description of how one of Johnson’s relatives made him get on his knees and thrust his fingers into the soil, by way of demonstrating the mistake that ruined the Johnson family’s fortunes. No matter where he dug, Caro said, he never found soil that was even deep enough to cover the length of his fingers. The land was beautiful, but the beauty was a veneer of easily exhausted soil over rock. Johnson’s father overpaid for his land, thinking he would grow crops, and so dragged the family into ruin. His son’s ruthlessness and drive, Caro explained, was rooted in that disaster.

Not all of this was new, and some of it has been offered by Caro at many other speaking engagements. But Caro’s storytelling skill rendered that irrelevant. To illustrate his theme of the need to convey a sense of place, Robert Caro spoke of New York City,Washington D.C., and the Texas countryside. But by the end of the evening, it was all Caro country, and I am eager to pay it another visit.

Local public libraries are being slashed and burned by budget cuts in Manatee County, Fla., but I have decided that I will just have to avail myself of their services until I land employment that allows for more luxuries again.

Books are so important in my life. In my moves in the past few years, the biggest part of the household goods being transported were the 30 boxes of books and the bookshelves. Even then, I still have some books packed away in the garage.

In this category, “Vinny’s Book Club,” I’ll be writing about some of the books I own and what they meant to me.

This time around, we’ll start with three books, Robert Caro’s three-volume (so far) work: “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.”

The first volume, “The Path to Power” (1982), documents LBJ’s life and that of his parents from the arrival of the family in the Texas Hill Country, through Johnson’s childhood, adolescence, college and post-college years, to his service for a member of Congress, then getting elected to Congress himself, and finally his unsuccessful 1941 campaign for the U.S. Senate in the special election held after one of Texas’ senators died.

We see the young LBJ working like few people have worked since, coming up from his family’s poverty and riding the Democratic wave of the Depression years. We also see his ruthlessness, his ambition, his use of others to get what he wants.

But Johnson soon decides that even being a member of the House of Representatives is not enough, and he starts angling for a seat in the U.S. Senate. His chance seems to arrive when a senator from Texas dies, and he runs in a special election but loses to the sitting governor of Texas, who special interests wanted out of the way.

The election was stolen, and Johnson assuaged his anger with the knowledge that the seat would come up again in the 1942 election cycle, and he’d have a shot at it.

But Pearl Harbor intervened, and we see in volume two, “Means of Ascent” (1990), that these are frustrating years for LBJ as he cannot run for Senate. The story of his Silver Star is recounted and his other experience as an officer in the Navy is told.

Johnson is shown as a remarkably ineffective member of Congress, with few records of him speaking or writing bills. He works during the war years and after to build a personal fortune, and Caro tells of the maneuvers that enabled LBJ to buy a radio station and parlay it into an empire via his personal influence on Capitol Hill.

Volume two ends with the bitter campaign for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination against legendary Texan Coke Stevenson, and the court fight over ballots that ended with Johnson winning by less than 100 votes. (In Texas elections then, the Republican Party and general election were anti-climactic; the primaries were the main battlegrounds)

The third volume is “Master of the Senate” (2002), in which Caro gives a history lesson of the U.S. Senate and how Johnson masters the body.

He starts as “Landslide Lyndon,” as he jokingly tells everyone, and ends up as Majority Leader, the man who started out the defender of the Jim Crow South but eventually pushes a civil rights bill to passage.

At the end, he is vice president of the U.S.

Caro is working on a fourth volume, about LBJ as president. It is tentatively titled “The Presidency.” I have no idea when it might come out.

My impressions of the series are that it presents the good, the bad, the ugly and the really ugly of Lyndon Baines Johnson. All politicians that attain great power are complex people, and LBJ was, I think an idealist at first but someone who believed that attaining power would benefit many others in the long run. He made deals, had an election stolen from him, stole one himself, assassinated the characters of his opponents and fought for real change in the lives of people, black and white.

His escalation of the war in Vietnam and the result overshadowed so much good that he did.

It takes many years to really decide how history will view a president. Some have even started to rehabilitate Lyndon Johnson. Me, I’m too young to have an opinion beyond what I’ve read since he left the White House when I was 8 years old.

I highly recommend this series to anyone who is interested in political biography and history.