The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Ratings59
Average rating4.7
“The Power Broker” recommends itself, but the sheer granularity of its institutional & geographical detail is actually brilliant. If you enjoy spending your bedtime reading allotment learning about the governance of bay bottom rights on the South Shore of Long Island or revel in details like the herd of inbred sheep that grazed on the west side of Central Park during the 1920s, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU.
A book and a half for make the reader realize that Robert Moses and his career were one and the same!
Didn't finish, super interested in the topic and I will do more exploring there, I just wasn't able to make it through the introductory parts to get to the parts I'm more interested in. Maybe will pick up again in the future.
An absolute monster of a book for an absolute monster of a man. It's hard to hate Robert Moses when I directly benefit from so many of his works but it's undeniable that he did more harm than good. A great read about what absolute power can do
I gave up on this book after 10%, which given that it's a massive fucking book, is actually quite the trial run. While it's a good read, it's not great, and its extreme length makes that a particularly bad tradeoff. This thing could do with an editor; I'll tolerate reading through the obligatory story of Moses' childhood, but hearing in great detail about his friends' childhoods too is just too much. Maybe it gets better, but maybe it doesn't, and I wasn't invested enough to find out.
Clearly a masterpiece. This book is very well-researched and well-written it by no means a page turner. It covers a lot of ground re: NYC history and politics but is overall in a league of its own.
It took me about a year, with liberal audiobook assist, to get through this book, but it really is incredibly well written and researched. A model of what biography can be, and for me, as an urban planner, a crucial read to understand the histories and hidden workings of the field.
I read more than half of this then got kind of bored with it. Robert Moses was a fascinating guy, his impact on NY is huge, and Caro is an excellent biographer but there was a lot more detail there than I care to cram into my brain.