I can't excerpt any one thing, it's so good.

For those who don't know, Robert Caro is a biographer of the highest order. He's known for being meticulous to a fault in his research and for taking an average of ten years of work per published volume. The animating theme of his career--spanning over fifty years of investigation and writing--is the study of man's search for political power. His two, only two, subjects are Robert Moses (1888--1981), an unelected power broker of New York City, and Lyndon Johnson.

I started Caro's multi-volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson with the first book, The Path to Power, published in 1982. Caro is still working on the final volume of the biography and, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's 2019 and he has "a few years" left before he thinks he'll be finished. What's astonishing about the first four volumes is that they barely touch on his time as president--the fourth book ends with his assumption of the presidency after Kennedy's assassination.