{"title":"Morning Joe 10\/30","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"texas10","title":"Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III (Vintage Books)","description":"\u003ci\u003eMaster of the Senate, \u003c\/i\u003eBook Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnson's story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e It was during these years that all Johnson's experience--from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine--came to fruition. 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He shows the dark side of Johnson's ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. 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Controlling them both, Nero's mother, Julia Agrippina the Younger, Roman empress, great-granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus, sister of the Emperor Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Emperor Claudius. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eJames Romm seamlessly weaves together the life and written words, the moral struggles, political intrigue, and bloody vengeance that enmeshed Seneca the Younger in the twisted imperial family and the perverse, paranoid regime of Emperor Nero, despot and madman. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eRomm writes that Seneca watched over Nero as teacher, moral guide, and surrogate father, and, at seventeen, when Nero abruptly ascended to become emperor of Rome, Seneca, a man never avid for political power became, with Nero, the ruler of the Roman Empire. We see how Seneca was able to control his young student, how, under Seneca's influence, Nero ruled with intelligence and moderation, banned capital punishment, reduced taxes, gave slaves the right to file complaints against their owners, pardoned prisoners arrested for sedition. But with time, as Nero grew vain and disillusioned, Seneca was unable to hold sway over the emperor, and between Nero's mother, Agrippina--thought to have poisoned her second husband, and her third, who was her uncle (Claudius), and rumored to have entered into an incestuous relationship with her son--and Nero's father, described by Suetonius as a murderer and cheat charged with treason, adultery, and incest, how long could the young Nero have been contained? \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eDying Every Day\u003c\/i\u003e is a portrait of Seneca's moral struggle in the midst of madness and excess. 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This is the story of a nation tearing at the seams and a republic tested by its own ideals. Not until ayear after the outbreak of the Civil War, when President Lincoln signed legislation that would unite the nation east to west by building a transcontinental railroad, was California’s loyalty secured.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePhilbrick follows the gold as it moves from riverbed to countinghouse to the halls of power, revealing how vigilantism hardened into law and how debates over slavery in the West tipped the balance in Washington. The result is a clear, human story of how a scramble for wealth reshaped ideas of freedom, labor, and belonging—and how California's rise helped push a fractured nation toward war. 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