An excellent, insightful account of american history and the key players. Written in light-hearted, editorial prose, this book is an easy read for those who found their high school american history classes boring.

But not only does this book suffer the fate of any one-volume biography, that of being neccessarily incomplete, but it also is rather sloppily written, at least by the standards of academic works. It has about as many instances of trivial sloppinesses, such as "He tried outfor the baseball team..." or The new student activism was a electric shock..." as I'd expect to see in a mass-market paperback, mistakes which I'm much less willing to accept in a book like this one.

A far superior biography of Johnson can be found in Rober Dallek's two-volume set, "Lone Star Rising" and "Flawed Giant".

On reading a one-volume biography on an individual that had such a long career in public office you know that it is an overview, there is just not the pages to really go through the work he did. If you are interested in LBJ you know that there are any number of books that focus on his decisions with the Viet Nam war and his record on civil rights laws. There may be even a few that talk about his plan to assassinate JFK but they belong with in the fiction section. What this book provides to the reader is a well-documented and constructed book that covers his life. Personally I could have done with less on his life before the age of 18, but that is standard fair for a bio.

The reader gets a good overview of the civil rights battles and laws LBJ fought for and put in place. It covers this section rather well and it left me wondering if maybe the authors focused on this positive aspect of his LBJ's presidency to the detriment of his dealings with the war. To be honest this was the section of the book I was most interested with and felt the authors could have done a better job and provided more detail.

The book is a good overview of LBJ. I felt the authors had a positive view of LBJ and if there were room for maneuver, they would take the road that left him in a more positive light. This is a good, broad review geared for the reader that maybe just starting to look into LBJ or just wants a nice general overview. If this is what you are looking for then this is the book for you.

an excellent biography of the career of LBJ, craftilly weaving between the simple values man and the complex politician. very worthwhile reading

This is the worst book I've read so far today. If you're wasting your time reading this, you'll love it. Tanks

there's alot that's not being taught you alice! take a nibble from my mushroom or a puff off my hookah and clear your head!
hey yeah this history brings back memories. it's right on - not lies! there needs to be a volume 2; from 1973-2003; maybe one of you who reads this will give it a try.
as for the other reviewer who's hangin' wid da Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh; no wonder he couldn't write a straight review; and no wonder he couldn't understand this book. that stuff really warps your thought; beware. cut to photo of brain;"here's your brain". cut to photo of my sunny side up eggs in a pan;"here's your brain on Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh". enough said. peace out.

The fact that you're reading this review can only mean one of two things: 1) you're an upper-classman or graduate student reluctantly forced to read Unger's book; or 2) you're an economist or historian manqué with a deep and unique curiosity about early American finance. I, for one, am the latter.

The essence of Irwin Unger's "The Greenback Era" - the 1965 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history - is that the motivations of the hard and soft money supporters of the post Civil War period are more nuanced than Charles Beard and other leading American historians would have you believe. The author rejects what he calls the duality and economic determinism of the old school. That is, that economic self-interest was the sole motivator in determining how one felt about the federal issue of paper legal tender (the Greenbacks) and that those motivations ultimately split the nation into mutually exclusive groups: East vs. West, debtor vs. creditor, agrarian vs. industrialist. Unger demonstrates that many groups held positions counter to what their economic self-interest would suggest, such as Western farmers whose deep-seated hostility to "rag money" dated back to the Jacksonian Era and held firm even as they suffered the brunt of the credit squeeze during the depression of the 1870s.

The book is well written and quite informative, although a bit anti-climatic (if such a term is appropriate to describe a treatise on post bellum national finance). The book traces the ideological battle between the forces in favor of hard money (resumption to gold) and those in favor of maintaining the Greenbacks from the period immediately following the Civil War to the resumption of the gold standard on 1 January 1879. Unger would have been well-advised to include a concluding chapter that put the debate and its denouement into historical and economic perspective, especially as it related to the Silver question, which in many ways was the robust progeny of the Greenback debate. As it is, "The Greenback Era" just seems to end with the resumption of gold payments with nary a thought or reflection on what it all meant.