“Half of all good writing is deleting.”

I did not find anything so revealing in this investigative work to warrant the absolute mountain of praise it has received. If you believe the US government/society is spotless, non-corrupt, just, and equal, then this book may change your mind. But for anyone who has long since abandoned that naïveté, there is nothing earth-shattering about this life-sucking stack of rambling administrative blah. Save your time poring through municipal bond covenants, legislative appendices, and the rest of it.

I am afraid this is the “Infinite Jest” of nonfiction - a book acclaimed and pursued for no apparent reason other than to seem intelligent. Onward !

I listened to most of this book on my long and torturous highway commute which is exactly what Robert Moses would have wanted <3

Literally nobody:

Me this past month: You ever heard about Robert Moses?

A few months ago, I watched Ric Burns’ “New York: A Documentary Film” and was surprised by much of the content in the episodes concerning the 20th century. No slouch in history, I felt blindsided by the fact these episodes spent so much time discussing the life and work of Robert Moses, a man I had never previously heard of. Awed by the scale of Moses’ achievements from this documentary, I decided to pick up Robert Caro’s The Power Broker- having also heard that the scale of Caro’s research was equally awesome. In this, my summer of Big Books, the Power Broker become my follow up to reading War and Peace. And if War and Peace rekindled a love and appreciation for literature, the Power Broker reignited a passion for history I didn’t even know had gone out.

In short, The Power Broker is probably the greatest history book/biography I’ve ever read. It has earned this distinction for the following reasons:

1. It made me feel like I was losing my history virginity all over again. This might be entirely subjective but reading this story about a historical figure I’d never heard about, presented with so much loving detail and context made me feel like I was a kid learning about the great figures of history for the first time. Of course this book isn’t just about Moses. It’s about Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia, Nelson Rockefeller and dozens of other big and small historical figures, their vaulting ambitions and their petty rivalries. On top of this “Great Man” history, the Power Broker is also a magnificent social history, giving voice to the thousands, if not millions, of people whose everyday lives were utterly transformed, usually for the worse, by Robert Moses’ projects. On TOP of that, the Power Broker is a gorgeous history of the landscape of New York City and Long Island. You will not forget the passages Caro devotes to discussing such landmarks as Jones Beach, the Central Park Zoo, Battery Park — to say nothing of the great behemoths of the Cross Bronx Expressway and Triborough.

2. It made me feel like a real adult. I saw another review on Goodreads basically say the same thing. More than any other book I’ve read, the Power Broker made me feel like I really was learning the machinery of how “the system” works. At its heart, the Power Broker is a 1200 page book with tiny print that is primarily concerned with bureaucratic maneuvering and infrastructure. And while there are some sections of the book that suffer for the density and complexity of these topics, overall this book is a page turner. Caro is able to make these incredibly dry, adult subjects seem sexy - if not because of the star power of New York City and its landmarks - then because at all times Caro is concerned with documenting the human cost of public works and “urban renewal”. You will read this book and shed a tear for the tragic decisions that doomed millions of New Yorkers (and Americans in general) to spend countless hours of their lives stuck in endlessly congested traffic. You will read this book and shed even more tears for the tragic decisions that condemned neighborhoods wholesale to social collapse, or worse, be outright torn down for the sake of highways. You will read these things and you will know what being a grown up is.

3. Robert Moses is one of the great “love to hate him” villains of all nonfiction. Short of the obvious despots and dictators, history books can be lacking in larger than life villains. No doubt Robert Moses was not a mass murderer. The closest he comes to this type of historical villain was by running his multiple agencies and authorities with the workaholic tyranny one associates with Napoleon (Moses’ own Elba was his Empire on Randalls Island). More aptly, Moses comes across as a cartoon villain scheming of grandiose ways to accumulate power and get back at his enemies (real and perceived). I’m picturing a Sindely Whiplash tying women to railroad tracks or a Mr Burns deciding to steal candy from a baby after blocking out the sun. So much of what makes this book a page turner owes itself to how deliciously petty and vindictive Moses was (see: tearing down the beloved Battery Aquarium as revenge for being told he had to build a tunnel instead of a bridge.) And yet it’s also trivializing to view his wickedness only in cartoonish terms. Caro walks a fine line to point out that the flip side to Moses’ brilliance and drive to accomplish was his lust for power and, even more damning, racism and disregard for anything and anyone that got in his way. The chapter about how he mistreated his family was heartbreaking but no less heartbreaking than his callous destruction of the Sunset Park and East Tremont neighborhoods.

4. This book is the greatest conversation starter ever. Read this book in public and somebody will invariably come up to you and talk to you about it. People you know and strangers alike. They’ll say that they’ve heard it’s an amazing book or that they read it and know it’s an amazing book. You will hear from people who love what Robert Moses built. You will hear from people who loathe Robert Moses, dead now for almost 40 years. This has never happened to me reading any other book and I wonder if it will ever happen again. It’s been one hell of an experience.

Robert Moses's story is an epic to realise a vision of urban splendour realised through sheer will, influence, and an understanding of power that would make Machiavelli pause for thought. Moses's journey is both awe-inspiring and a cautionary tale. Caro, with precision, rigorous research and the insight of a psychologist, dissects the ways in which Moses's quest reshaped the very fabric of New York, often at a steep cost to its soul and its inhabitants.

What renders The Power Broker so resonant for me, beyond its exploration of power dynamics and urban planning, is the nuanced portrayal of Moses himself. Caro presents him not simply as a villain or hero but as a character, whose flaws and ambitions are inseparable from his achievements. It serves as a reminder of the complexity of those who shape our world, the mixed legacies they leave behind and the countless, often voiceless, lives altered in their wake.

Engaging with Caro's narrative felt akin to observing the landscapes and scenes I've traversed in works like Under the Volcano or The Recognitions. Here, the city's infrastructure plays the dual role of stage and actor, reflecting the grandiose dreams and stark realities of its architect. It's a story that compels us to look beneath the surface, to perceive the human desires, the conflicts, and the compromises woven into the urban fabric.

It's an epic book that doesn't merely recount history; it invites us to question the forces that shape our environments and our lives within them. Caro's work, much like the layered narratives of William Gaddis or the intricate worlds of Joseph McElroy, offers a mirror to the complexities of progress and power, urging us to ponder the paths we pave for future generations.

The Power Broker is not just a biography of a man or an analysis of urban planning; it's an epic, a cautionary tale, and a reminder of the indelible mark one individual can leave on the canvas of history.

Wow, what a book. I feel like I’ve lived a whole lifetime within these pages.

Power, public works, the lucky brakes over the arc of a persons career, Miscalculations, coverups, partnerships, friends and allies turned enemies. An empire built on toll bridges. All of it. I don’t think I can quite summize this book. It’s sprawling, about Moses yes, but also New York, the city and the state. Mayors, Senators, engineers, celebrities and notable presidents. Slums, poverty, parks and construction.

There’s a few books that I’ve read, I can tell I’ll never quite be the same after reading them, I think this is one of those. I feel like it just changes the way you think about the world, life, how things happen.

Wow I finally made it. And I loved it. The Power Broker is just as much a biography of New York City as it is of Robert Moses. I thought One Mile (Phoebe’s favorite chapter) explained how RM did not care about New Yorkers at the time, and Highwayman (my favorite chapter) explained how RM did not care about New Yorkers today. This book also perfectly explained why we now have congestion pricing in 2025, despite being written 50 years ago.

Seriously so worth the read. S/o Phoebe for the rec!

This is definitely the greatest book that I have ever read.

Midway through adolescence, I began wondering a bit which life event would finally make me feel like an adult. Of course I had the usual teenaged hypotheses, and acted accordingly to test some of them out. Getting drunk? Having sex? Driving a car? Going to college? None of these things did make me feel grownup; in many instances, their effect was the opposite. I had a brief thrilling moment of maturity when I voted for the first time at age eighteen, but election returns in the years since (in particular the 2004 presidential race) dulled the sophisticated glamour of the ballot box, forcing me to admit that an ability to vote does not indicate the presence of intellectual maturity... The first time I got a job with benefits and sat through a presentation explaining the HMO plan, life insurance, and “401K,” I did feel old in a certain kind of way, but there was a sense of the absurd to it, as if I were in drag as an adult, staggering around in my mother’s too-big high heels and smudgy lipstick in a silly effort to look like a grown woman.

For the past few years I’ve had the sense of wearing an oversized grownup life that wasn’t actually mine, while that magical rite of passage into adulthood continued to elude me. Maybe when I have children things will click into place, I’ve mused, listening to Talking Heads with one ear and sort of doubting it.... Part of this might be generational; if thirty is the new twenty, it’s no wonder that I get that Lost Boys feeling, and shrug confusedly when overnight company makes fun of my teddy bear.

I’m pleased to announce that thanks to the glory of Robert Caro, this stage is basically behind me. Having finally finished The Power Broker, I feel much more like a grownup, and believe it or not, I’m pretty into that.

When I was a little kid, I felt that the adults around me had a thick, rich, complicated understanding of the way the world worked. They knew things – facts, history – and they understood processes and people and the way something like a bond measure or a public authority worked. It was this understanding – which they had, and I didn’t – that made me a child, and them adults. Grownups had an infrastructure of information, truth, and insight that I lacked. As I grew older, I was dismayed to discover that grownups really didn’t know a fraction of what I gave them credit for, and that most of the people ostensibly running the world had no clue how it operated, and my intense disillusionment caused me to lose sight of that adulthood theory for awhile.

But reading this book made me feel like a grownup because it helped me to understand the way the world works as I never had before. This book is about power. It is about politics. It is a history of New York City and New York State. It is an explanation of how public works projects are built. It is about money: public money, private money, and the vast and nasty grey areas where they overlap. This book is about democracy, and the lack thereof. It is about social policy, and economics, and our government, and the press. This book is about urban planning, housing, transportation, and about how a few individuals’ decisions can affect the lives of the masses. It helped explain traffic in the park, and the projects in Brownsville, and a billion other mysteries of New York City life that I'd wondered about. The Power Broker is about ideals, talent, and institutional racism. It is about inequality. It is about genius. It is about hubris. It is the best goddamn book I have ever read in my entire life, hands down, seriously.

Please do not think that it took me five months to read this book because it was dense or slow! This was a savoring, rather than a trudging, situation. Robert Caro is an incredibly engaging writer. One thing that happened to me early on from reading this was that I lost my taste for trashy celebrity gossip. Who CARES about Britney’s breakdown or, for that matter, Spitzer’s prostitute peccadilloes when I could be reading about the shocking intricacies of Robert Moses’ 1925 legislative consolidation and reorganization of New York State’s administrative structure? This book gave me chills – CHILLS! – on nearly every page with descriptions of arcane political maneuvering and fiscal policy so riveting that I lost my previous interest in reading about sex and drugs. Let’s face it: sex and drugs are pretty boring. Political graft, mechanics of influence, the workings of government: now that’s the hot stuff, when it’s presented in an accessible and digestible form. Nothing in the world is more fascinating than power, and Robert Caro writes about power better than anyone I’ve come across. There are no dry chapters in this book; there’s barely a dull page. It is infinitely more readable than Us magazine, and not much more difficult.

Of course The Power Broker is many things, among them a biography. While any one portrait of New York power icons from Al Smith to Nelson Rockefeller is more than worth the price of admission, this book is primarily about Robert Moses. Caro understands and explains the relationship between individual personalities and systems. One of his main theses is that Moses achieved the unchecked and unparalleled levels of power he did because he figured out how to reshape or create systems around himself. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority would not have existed without Robert Moses, and Robert Moses would not have been what he was, or accomplished what he did, without the brilliance he had for shaping the very structure of government into conduits for his own purposes. To explain this, Caro needs to convey a profound understanding not only of how these systems worked, but of who this man was. He does so, and the result goes beyond Shakespearean: it is Epic. The Power Broker is the story George Lucas was trying to tell about Anakin Skywalker’s transformation to Darth Vader, only George Lucas is no Robert Caro, and The Power Broker succeeds wildly in the places where Star Wars was just a hack job (of course, Caro wasn’t handicapped by Hadyn Christensen, which does indirectly raise the burning question: WHO’S OPTIONED THIS???).

Robert Moses was an incredible genius. He was also an incredible asshole. Robert Moses was probably one of the biggest assholes who ever lived, or at least, who ever got free reign to redesign a major modern American city to his fancy. One of the innumerable triumphs of this book is that while it certainly does demonize Moses to a great extent, it doesn't seem to do so unjustifiably, and it never strips him of his humanity. Caro conveys a deep respect and empathy for his brilliant subject, even as he also expresses horror, disgust, and rage as he describes Moses’ forty-four-year unelected reign of power.

I know it’s a mistake to do this review right after finishing, and I’m a bit grossed out that I could write something so gushingly uncritical; that’s unlike me, and it’s possible that later I’ll think of some complaints…. I might not, though. I really do think that this is the best book I’ve ever read, and I wish there were some way that I could adopt Robert and Ina Caro as my grandparents, and that I could go over to their house for Sunday dinner and then take walks together in Central Park. Right at this moment I believe that Robert Caro is the smartest person in the world, and I’m not in the least bit resentful that I’m going to have to devote the rest of my life to reading his LBJ doorstoppers; in fact, I welcome it (though I’m not in a huge hurry to start).

Oh, I’m sure this book has flaws like any other. My main problem with it was that it was too short. Caro did not go into nearly enough detail about a large number of issues that I’d expected to learn about. For instance, there was little more than offhand mentions of Moses’ upstate projects; I was surprised that there was virtually nothing in here about Niagara Falls. There was also almost nothing on Shea Stadium, and while they did keep coming up, I never felt adequately informed about Moses’ plans for the three crosstown expressways, and the successful opposition to them. How real a prospect were these, and what did the public fight look like? I wasn’t so clear on that. While it’s possible that Caro had nothing interesting to say about these projects, it’s more likely that he had to draw the line somewhere, and 1162 pages was that place. I mean, otherwise he probably could’ve gone on forever…. There’s a lot to say.

I definitely recommend that anyone who reads this book do as I did, and divide it with an exacto knife into four duct-tape bound commuter volumes. It’s fun to draw your own Power Broker covers on your personalized editions, and a good excuse to pull out those crayons which, as a bona fide adult, you so rarely use!

It occurs to me that I’ve babbled on forever but still haven’t explained at all what this book is about. If you think you might want to read it but you’re not sure, check out this article by Robert Caro:
http://www.robertmosesnyc.com/citysha...
It has those stupid New Yorker dots, which the book thankfully does not, but otherwise is kind of like a miniaturized version of The Power Broker and gives a much better sense than I just did of what it’s all about.

Had a goal of finally finishing the Power Broker this year and snuck in under the wire! Definitely the longest book I’ve ever read, but unlike most longer books these days I didn’t actually feel like it needed more editing. There were certainly parts I found more interesting (parks and specific public works in the city) than others (lots of names and details about financial transactions and politics) - but overall it was a truly masterful work and I learned so much. I love learning about NYC and urban planning and found it really interesting to think about the book in the context of the time it was written (50 years ago!).

I DID IT! Reading this book was an event, an accomplishment, a marathon, and a joy!

Robert Moses has affected all our lives a lot and yet we've never heard of him! If you want 1,162 pages of fascinating information about New York, how cities work, political machinations, and how things might have been different, I can't recommend this highly enough!

"The Power Broker" pulls back the curtain on how things get done in America.

This is the greatest book I have ever read. Robert Moses’ ascent from a marginalized Yale undergraduate to the supreme power broker in New York is a nearly unbelievable story, but Robert Caro does a masterful job of tracing his rise and subsequent reign. What sets this biography apart is how meticulously Caro investigated the concrete steps Moses took to acquire and wield power. Caro sharply sketches portraits of Moses’ many accomplices, adversaries, and victims to fill in the context of each of his maneuvers. Over more than 1,200 pages, Caro reveals Moses’ ruthlessness and genius for “getting things done.”

Nearly every major highway, bridge, park, and housing project in New York City (and many in New York) was constructed under the reign of Robert Moses. For decades - the critical decades for the buildout of NYC - Moses held nearly total control over all construction activities in America’s largest city. His Triborough Bridge Authority was essentially an independent “4th branch” of government with its own revenues, territory, and security force. One of his most potent tools was the pile of toll money from his Authorities that allowed him to to distribute vast amounts of money in secret and with no oversight. He wielded his power by distributing over 27 billion dollars (in 1968 dollars!) worth of funds to an empire of construction contractors, politicians, insurance agents, lawyers, and banks. And ultimately, only the Rockefeller family was powerful enough to displace him from his throne.

Moses deeply understood how government works. He had a genius for expanding the power of previously unimportant posts - indeed, his career was launched from the backwaters of the Long Island State Park Commission. He created and profoundly increased the power of the Triborough Bridge Authority in a single brilliant stroke by realizing that if he wrote powers into his (unintendedly) renewable bond covenants, his powers would be guaranteed by the Constitution's protection of contracts.

He was also a master deceiver. “The best bill drafter in Albany” often accumulated power by sneaking in seemingly innocuous language into bills he crafted. The legislators voting on these proposals didn’t realize until too late that they had granted Moses yet more power. As I read about this trickery, I was reminded of the Yale professor Charles Hill’s assertion that civilization collapses when “words lose their meaning.” Although (remarkably) he was “money-honest” himself, behind the scenes he was the center of all money corruption in the city. Yet, Moses managed to maintain a pristine public image for nearly his entire career.

As I was reading, I often wondered how Moses got away with so much. Part of it was his preparation. His first decade of failure gave him plenty of time to dream up grand plans for laying out parks and highways across New York. His early defeats forced him to understand how the mechanisms of government work. Then, when Belle Moskowitz plucked him from obscurity and gave him his first position of power with Governor Al Smith, he already had a plan in place and could move at a breakneck pace.

This preparation was essential for his exploitation of a critical dynamic. Public officials were on tight re-election cycles and needed to be able to point to concrete accomplishments so that they could get re-elected. Moses was the ultimate technocrat and could deliver complex projects on time. His price was that politicians couldn’t make any modifications to his plans - they had to either take them or leave them. And Moses regularly presented initial costs as far below what they actually were. When he came back and asked for more money, politicians were left with two options: 1) refuse his request and leave a project unfinished - thus appearing not only to be wasting money but also to be negligent in their initial assessment or 2) pony up the cash. They almost always chose door #2. And to worsen their predicament, they couldn’t turn Moses down because he was one of the only people who get get things done quickly. When they resisted, a flood of angry phone calls deluged their offices.

This was because behind Moses’ power was the insidious fact that his projects were often in everyone’s interest except the public’s. Contractors wanted contracts. Local politicians wanted jobs in their neighborhoods. Insurance brokers wanted premiums. Legislators wanted concrete accomplishments to point to. PR firms wanted retainers. Banks wanted deposits and bond investment opportunities. All of these parties worked together to extract vast sums of money in taxes and tolls from the public and line their own pockets.

Of course, it helped that many of Moses’ projects were extremely popular with the public. Caro argues that the popularity of parks as a civic issue (alongside motherhood and apple pie) really made Moses’ early career and allowed him to accumulate vast amounts of power under the protective glow of the verdant and wildly popular parks.

But the public was never allowed to understand the financial and political manipulations that went on behind the scenes. One of the most disturbing aspects of the entire Robert Moses story is the profound and systemic failure of New York’s press. Not only did they consistently fail to verify any of his facts or figures, but they unquestioningly published Moses’ editorials and supported him for years without ever bothering to do the investigative legwork that was their duty. It was only the work of a few dogged investigative journalists at a second-rate paper that finally brought many of Moses’ abuses to light - and even then, only after he had been in power for decades.

To be fair, Moses was a genius at "Getting Things Done." He bestowed upon the people of New York hundreds of parks and playgrounds. He built arterial transportation networks where no one else could have managed to build anything. Caro laments that there were missed opportunities for mass transit, but it’s unclear that those opportunities would have ever existed without Moses - and then NYC might be in an even worse place today. In addition, Moses trained an entire generation of highway builders in the United States. Throughout the book, Caro notes how Moses was dedicated to the recruitment, training, and development of talent within his organization. And although he was a tyrant, he seemed to run a remarkably meritocratic (at least for whites) organization. Thousands of people got their first real chance at success by working with Moses and many of them found great purpose and satisfaction in their work.

Yet Moses’ successes had sown the seeds of his destruction. The man who built his career on parks was undone by a half-acre bit of Central Park and a squadron of Park Ave moms. He also got tripped up by his military-style organizational structure. Moses demanded absolute loyalty from his men, but in return he gave them unconditional support in public. This let him run a very tight organization, but opened him up to trouble when his subordinates publicly committed to untenable positions (as in the Shakespeare-in-the-park debacle). But Moses arrogance was ultimately responsible for his own downfall. Trying to bully Governor Nelson Rockefeller, he used his classic technique of threatening to resign. Rockefeller called his bluff and suddenly Moses wasn’t irreplaceable anymore. And so the man who even FDR couldn’t remove from power ended up removing himself.

Towards the end, Moses seemed to be making lots of bad decisions - most notably the disastrous World’s Fair. Early on in his career, he was walking to work for an hour each day and had plenty of time for planning and introspection, laying the foundation for his future success. Caro argues that by the end, Moses was so busy running his empire that he no longer had time for reflection. Perhaps a cautionary tale for high-level executives today.

I struggle to decide how I feel about Robert Moses. After all, he was a master of the art of “Getting Things Done.” And as he himself said, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” - there are always going to be winners and losers in big, ambitious projects. I have trouble swallowing his refusal to build mass transit - it seems as though he willfully disregarded the public good so that he could maintain power (although maybe the advent of self-driving cars will vindicate him). But to me, the toughest thing to get around is his outright arrogance, mean-spiritedness, and racism. Moses not only was so arrogant as to be unelectable, but he completely screwed over his brother (who ended up dying in poverty because Moses blocked him from getting jobs and hijacked his inheritance). Caro also does a thorough job of documenting Moses’ contempt for non-whites.

Robert Caro put in an insane amount of meticulous research into these 1,200 pages and ended up with perhaps the world's greatest textbook on how to acquire power and get things done in government. He conducted 522 interviews (with fascinating notes on each listed in the back of the book) and read an absurd number of books. As he says in the Selected Bibliography, “A bibliography for this book would be another book in itself, and an exercise in pedantry to boot.” But while this book is crammed with details, Caro keeps the pace moving along and paints brief but vivid portraits of the many characters that Robert Moses coerced, deceived, and manipulated. “The Power Broker” absolutely deserved the Pulitzer and as one critic said, it is a “majestic, even Shakespearean, drama about the interplay of power and personality.”

Caro believes that the movers-and-shakers of the world are driven by power, money, and sex. He’s probably right. But having gotten this inside look at the world of power and what it does to people, I’m not sure I want anything to do with it. Power is a zero-sum game and I don't think smart people shouldn’t play zero-sum games. Or maybe that’s naive. Someone is going to wield power - maybe it’s better to have a brilliant technocrat?

Full review with quotes at http://books.max-nova.com/the-power-broker

This book was crack to me. Reading this book feels like earning a college minor. Who knew nonfiction could be this interesting and this mutidimensional. Caro’s writing never felt like a slog. He has a gift of changing focuses and style every 1-2 chapters, without making the book feel disjointed. I’m so excited to read about LBJ next

THE POWER BROKER

Robert Moses built a bunch of important stuff in and around New York City. Expressways, Parkways, Jones Beach, a big dam up north, Lincoln Center, etc.

His family immigrated to the USA from Germany and the Russian Pale back in the mid 1800s when it was rough going for Jews in Europe. They were hard working and became rich.

Robert Moses’s grandma and ma were both super driven, headstrong ladies. He went to Yale and was on the swim team. He wasn’t the best swimmer but man did he like management. It wasn’t super cool to be a Jew at Yale though.

Next, he went to Oxford and took a real shine to the English style of ‘public service’ where basically rich, highly educated, white people were in charge of how society worked.

He came back to the US and got a low-level city planning job. He entered public service with an idealism and desire to do good that contrasted sharply with the corruption and incompetence that widespread in the current administration of Tammany Hall.

He rises in power, is given a bunch of titles and is put in charge of a bunch of stuff like parks and roads and bridges. He builds Jones Beach so people from the city can go play at the beach but as long as they’re not poor.

He ruins a lot of neighborhoods in order to make on-ramps to his bridges. He tears down more in the pursuit of slum clearance but doesn’t give the people he displaces anywhere else to go so then more slums appear. He lets public and mass transit wither and his roads become super long parking lots of traffic jams. He really did not like poor people and thought the good life was really just for people with cars. He didn’t like black people either, going so far as to demand the temperature of public pools be kept unusually low so they wouldn’t want to swim there.

FUN FACT: Turns out Sunset Park used to have an area called Finn-Town where the scandos lived. But then they all moved away once Moses fucked it all up by tearing down 3rd avenue.

Eventually the press, which had had its tongue all the way up his ass for 30 years turns on him and points out the fact that he’s a petty, bigoted corrupt asshole. And then the book starts drawing to a close.

Thank fuck.

This was a long boring book. Kudos to Caro for his thoroughness of basically writing down what happened in 70 years’ worth of municipal meetings. It’s mind numbing and not that interesting unless you are the type of person that is enthralled by city-level political minutiae.

At the end of the day we have Robert Moses to thank for some nice things and some shitty things in NYC. The end.