Although many folks know he is responsible for parks, bridges, roads, and tunnels - did you know that he reformed the budget system for the state of New York? Did you know that he was an Ivy League do gooder that never had a real paying job until he was more than 30 years old? Did you know that he spent his entire young adulthood trying to reform government? Did you know that the man most responsible for the highway, bridges, and tunnels of NYC, never had a driver’s license? He was chauffer driven all his life.

Interesting study of a mulit-faceted man who points out the dangers of judging folks that do great things on either only one dimension or the same scale we use to evaluate our private lives. Interesting to see how men that do great things also make great mistakes, commit great sins, and have great personalities. A great example of how to make a great omelet you have to break some eggs.
A huge intellect
A huge reformer
A huge ego
A huge bully that believed in quashing any disagreement (important and unimportant), so that others would fear to disagree and therefore not impede his progress.

full credit to chris whose recommendation pushed this book from a “maybe will read one day” to a “must read right now at this very moment.” and i’m so glad i did!!

this book took over my life for the entire time i was reading it. there’s just so much detail that even if i had wanted to, i couldn’t resist becoming fully submerged in it. and i loved every second, to the point where i was consciously slowing down and was often rereading paragraphs or entire pages.

i was also so impressed by caro’s style as a whole. he’s using novel-esque elements (rich characters, narrative tension and buildup and backstabbing, descriptive descriptive prose) within a traditional nonfiction structure (intro paragraphs, source citing, looots of signposting and roadmapping and topic sentences). the result is somehow both classic and singular and it amazed me. i can see myself revisiting this book just to remind myself of this style and how well caro pulls it off.

also many more thoughts on law, politics, conservation, elitism, democracy which i’ll spare y’all. one thing i’ll say is that my recent fountainhead read definitely enriched the philosophical experience here bc it was impossible not to draw parallels between moses and multiple characters in that book. but overall just a LOT to think about and i’ll be thinking about it all for a long long time. i wonder if this will lead to a much needed nonfiction era for me… we shall see!!

This is a six star book. I read it after having hoovered up Caro's LBJ series, and while nothing to me can equal those for sheer writing power, this comes damn close. Like those books, this is exhaustively researched and sourced from an unimaginable number of archival documents and personal interviews. Like those books, it is the study of a man who loved power more than anything, and whose most minor whims have consequences that echo to this day. Like those books, its depth seems to encompass the whole world, with innumerable fascinating asides and brief sketches of tangents that could be turned into book in themselves. Like those books, it is incredibly well-written; the cause of many sleepless nights trying to get in "just a few more pages". I'll say that while it took a bit longer to get sucked into the Northeastern world of this guy who built bridges and parks than it did into the more familiar Texas of LBJ, Caro is such a great writer that I was glad I stuck with it. There are so many great themes at work here: the power of will and determination and genius in a world of mediocrity, the conflict between democracy and "getting things done", the effects of power on the powerless, the sad longing for (literally) roads not taken, the difference between Carlyle's and Hegel's versions of history... it's the story of how America became the car-addicted, sprawl-infested society we are today and what happens to little people when powerful people treat their homes and their lives like Monopoly pieces. This is one of those books that takes such a deep look at society that no matter what you thought about our country before, you'll think something different after you're done. This is the book to read if you're interested in Robert Moses, the history of New York City, or of urban planning, or the creation of the idea of suburbia, or a million other details of life in the first half of the twentieth century, when the whole world looked to New York as the place where the future had just arrived ten minutes ago.

Amazon, 2008-10-13.

Something about Caro's writing is really irritating me, and I can't put my finger on it. The characters thus far are awesome, though. I wish I had more time to be putting into it :/.
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2013-09-13 picked this back up a few days ago, after reading Caro's LBJ books last year. started over from the beginning. really wondering how Caro is going to justify the remaining ~500 pages, though the first 500 were pretty damn good.
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Searching the e-text reveals that the phrase "the best bill writer in albany" is used 106 times in this book. denis leary once summed up oliver stone's movie "the doors" as:

i'm drunk
i'm nobody
i'm drunk
i'm famous
i'm drunk
i'm fuckin' dead
big fat dead guy in a bathtub

this likewise could have gone

i'm ruthless
i build good shit
i'm ruthless
i build
i'm ruthless
everything i build sucks
old deaf guy and lots of traffic

caro sure does seem to think hating someone is a prerequisite of writing their biography (see his ongoing lyndon b. johnson pentalogy). this book was really good, but about 2x longer than it needed to be. at times, it's like trying to construct a narrative from the backs of a decade's Topps baseball cards. we get it: he doesn't like poor people, he's arrogant, he's all for parks and highways. i guess it's a necessary element of being authoritative and the biography of record but christ, another pulitzer prize winner (and my favorite biography ever), American Prometheus, covered an even more fascinating man in half the pages.

worth reading, but i'm not going to read it again.

One million words. More.

The Power Broker is the kind of book you see in a bookshop, pick it up, put it back down again because its weight is a physical assault on your wrist.

It isn't available as a digital edition for Kindle, so you're stuck with lugging the physical copy around with you. I started this book in February, setting up a Beeminder goal to keep me on track. The pages are large and the type small, so even a goal of reading twenty pages a day took 30-45 minutes.

I persevered, despite some weeks where I was travelling and therefore separated from the 1.3 kilogramme tome.

It was worth it. At over a million words, Caro obviously has the space to include a good deal of detail.

Robert Moses, if you're still reading by this point, is the subject of this biography. Moses worked in city planning, transportation and huge building projects in the New York state area (and some other big ones elsewhere in the United States). Caro's book details his life story, showing how Moses' drive 'got things done' in and around the city. Whether it was building roads or huge buildings, Moses was a force to be reckoned with in political as well as administrative terms.

Caro approaches his subject from a number of different perspectives. He appears to have read a huge amount of the raw primary source material in the public domain as well as interviewed 522 individuals close to or involved in Moses' work. That he managed to keep the book so readable is almost a miracle in and of itself. Every page draws you in, details and stories and glimpses that make Moses and the times in which he live come to life.

There are so many amazing details and sections to this book that picking any one would detract from the whole. If you have the time (and the stamina), give this book a read, even if you have no prior interest in urban planning. Highly recommended.

This was quite possibly the greatest book I’ve ever read. The Power Broker is, first and foremost, a biography of Robert Moses: a man who was never elected to any public office (and, in fact, was roundly defeated on the only occasion on which he put himself before the public in an election), but who had perhaps a greater physical impact on New York City and State in the 20th century than any other single person.

Robert Moses learned early in his career that dreams and ideas without the power to realize them are useless. Once he learned how power could enable his dreams (and he had plenty) to become realities, he betrayed the idealism of his youth and his belief in the reform movement and instead focused his efforts on gaining power by any means necessary. Once he got a taste for it, would stop at nothing to accumulate more and more.

Robert Moses was a genius — that no one can deny — but his reshaping of New York did much more harm than it did good. He plainly hated the people he was ostensibly serving in building his “public” spaces, most notably people of color and poor people. He barred Black people from his pristine beaches, he taunted them by decorating a playground in Harlem with monkeys (the only one in the city to feature such decor, by the way), and of course he built the environment to privilege those who owned cars over those who relied on public transportation. As he built more roads, highways, and bridges, he remained willfully blind to the destruction he was causing. Not the destruction of the natural environment and thriving neighborhoods he directed to complete his projects — of that he was fully aware — but blind to the harms of congestion and traffic, because he never learned to drive and had no need to. He was driven by a chauffeur all his life and thought of driving, even in the 1950s, as a leisure activity for the upper echelon.

Moses was a stubborn man. He refused to adapt any of his plans even when all the data showed they could be improved and public sentiment was against him. He was immune from public pressure by virtue of holding no public office and using trickery to codify more and more power for himself into law until no one — not the mayor, not the governor, and only one occasion the president of the United States could tell him what to do. He refused to add additional right-of-way to major expressways being built on Long Island which would have made building rapid transit easier in the future (a 16 minute link from Penn Station to JFK Airport was in our reach!), he refused to widen the those highways or to raise the heights of intersecting bridges to accommodate buses using them, because he did not want the class of people who relied on public transportation to be able to use his parks. By making these decisions unilaterally, he sealed the fate of New Yorkers for generations, forcing us to live in a region dominated by traffic, and noise, and pollution.

Robert Moses used despicable tactics, leveraging power he had accumulated to direct projects to begin under the cover of night, or while decisions on their legality were still pending, so that no matter what was decided, no one could stop him from completing them as he designed. He tore down ferry docks on a day when people had used the ferry to get to work. He hacked down ancient trees with verve before the scheduled public hearing on that action. There are many more examples.

Robert Moses was a liar and a manipulator. He constantly obfuscated the true costs of his projects, knowing many would never be approved if he was honest about them. On innumerable occasions, he would cite the cost of a project as a tiny fraction of reality, break ground on it, and then go back over and over to attain the funds needed to complete it. He used his charm and intelligence to win the political support of better and more well-meaning men than himself, support which stood for decades even as he continued his destructive building campaigns and fell further and further from the good intentions of his younger years.

Robert Moses had no morals and the price to buy his favor was almost shockingly low. Once a crusading enemy of the robber barons of Long Island, when he found that they were willing to help finance his projects, he quickly changed his tune. He became deferential to them, shifting his roads away from their estates and instead hacking up the farms of families who had no money or power. Later, he would be completely subordinate to Long Island's wealthy elite as he became their pick for the Republican nomination for Governor of New York.

So much of his career was enabled by the media, which hailed him as a great friend of the public: someone who was above politics, totally uncorrupted, had no personal interest in money, and was a champion for the people and parks to serve them. The mythology that was created around him survived for decades. Not until his arrogance and stubbornness for the sake of stubbornness were on full display in two fights over Central Park (one: to tear down a playground and erect a parking lot for the expensive Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant; the other to cancel the free Shakespeare in the Park festival enjoyed by the city's residents) did his star begin to fade in a sustained fashion. A group of young journalists too young to remember the opening of Jones Beach and the Long Island parkways forced stories of his mismanagement of Title I housing into daily newspapers, stories which, in combination with fading public opinion due to the Central Park fights, eventually gained further prominence in the Times.

A lesser writer than Caro would not have been able to make so compelling the story of the technical legislative maneuvering, shrewd dealmaking, and shatterproof charm that allowed Robert Moses to gain and wield total power in New York. His writing is dramatic, precise, and skillful. Some of the prose is genuinely beautiful. His descriptions of the scenery of Long Island, the serenity of Battery Park, the uncorrupted Inwood Hill, and more are intensely visual. The reader feels genuine sympathy as we follow families denied access to public space on Long Island even as more families acquire cars to reach it, and as we learn about neighborhoods RM destroyed just because he had the power to exert his will (Sunset Park, East Tremont and Spuyten Duyvil could have been saved just by shifting a road a block or two).

This book taught me more than everything else I've ever learned combined about how this city I live in and love was built. I ride on streets, run over bridges, and visit beaches and parks Moses was responsible for building every day. He changed the face of the city completely, and, as was his wish, we still live under most of his designs (including highway overpasses and bumper-to-bumper traffic). In that way, he won. He made himself immortal. There were planners who envisioned streetcars and bike lanes and making New York a place designed for people and not cars. They advocated futilely for these projects for decades while RM continued his building campaigns. Ideas are useless without the power to realize them.

In addition to painting a full portrait of Robert Moses, Caro also delves into the backgrounds and lives of many of his contemporaries. He served during (I can't say under) the administrations of five mayors and six governors, and we meet them all. Look to the Power Broker not just for the biography of a bureaucrat but for a political and physical history of New York City and State in the 20th century.

This book is very long and very dense, but it is anything but dry. I would certainly recommend it strongly to anyone who lives in New York, anyone interested in urban planning, or anyone who wants to see lain bare how political power truly gets amassed. And probably just anyone in general. It is quite an education.

https://thebestbiographies.com/2019/0...

ublished in 1974, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” was Robert Caro’s first book – and earned him the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Caro is best known for his ongoing series covering the life of Lyndon B. Johnson. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for the third volume (“Master of the Senate”) and is currently working on the fifth – and presumably final – book in the series.

“The Power Broker” is notable both for what it is – a monumental investigative work and piercing exploration of a fascinating personality – and what it is not – an easy-to-digest narrative intended for the casual fan of great biography. This 1,162-page book is hefty but engrossing, detailed but illuminating and unquestionably demands more patience and perseverance than most biographies.

Readers familiar with Caro’s series on LBJ will find his writing style strikingly familiar: penetrating and potent but not particularly elegant and frequently dense but rarely dull. And given Caro’s knack for uncovering and piecing together various elements of his subject’s life, his background as an investigative reporter is hardly surprising.

This biography starts off somewhat slowly but once it is running at full steam (after about two-hundred pages) it is almost inexplicably enthralling. Robert Moses is not someone familiar to most readers, but Caro’s biography carefully tracks each phase of his uniquely consequential life – his rise to power, the decades he spent exercising that power and his eventual fall. At times this is as much a study of power as of Robert Moses.

There are too many excellent moments to comprehensively chronicle, but among the best are the chapter outlining Moses’ early vision for the development of Long Island, the review of his rise to power in New York City, descriptions of the ongoing tension between Moses and Franklin Roosevelt and the examination of Moses’ involvement in the Central Park Zoo and Triborough Bridge projects.

Caro also provides excellent introductions to important supporting characters such as Al Smith, Fiorello La Guardia and Nelson Rockefeller. And the chapter dedicated to describing a typical work day for Moses near the peak of his power, including his strategy for entertaining guests and dignitaries, is one of the book’s best.

This book’s few weaknesses are not well-hidden. The narrative rarely hurries to get to the heart of a matter and paragraphs routinely consume most of a page. Lacking both efficiency and a colorful fluidity, this is not a carefree read. In addition, Moses’ early years elapse far too quickly and his personal life proves elusive. But because his life revolved almost entirely around his career, this imbalance is unsurprising if unfortunate.

Overall, Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” is an incredibly interesting, uncommonly penetrating and unquestionably demanding biography of one of New York’s most consequential public figures. Anyone seeking a casual biographical experience will find this book weighty and intense. But readers seeking a a fascinating story about a surprisingly compelling subject (and underpinned by meticulous research) will find few better biographies than this.

Overall rating: 4½ stars

1) This is a long ass book. If you’re going to read it, know that it’s 1,200 pages, so that about 4-6 other books you could have read.

2) Robert Moses was a racist and a classist. He built bridges that were a foot too short for public buses to use, evicted tenants from public housing to build bridges used by those wealthy enough to own cars, and despite his initial bread and butter of park building, built basically zero playgrounds in Harlem and communal spaces that were accessible for New York’s most vulnerable.

3) He was awful to his family. He ruined his brother Paul’s career/refused to pay him out his inheritance when he was a trustee in a family estate. He cheated on and remarried less than a month after his first wife’s death. He was Machiavellian in his interactions with everyone- quick to discard those who were no longer useful and exploit others to further his own aims.

4) He built many things in the New York Metro area: parks, beaches, bridges, highways, roads, playgrounds. Much of New York of the 20th century was shaped by Robert Moses’ behind the scenes manipulation and puppet mastery. He was a political power broker who had the ear of New York mayors and governors for decades until Nelson Rockefeller pulled the rug from his power brokerage in his late 70s. He seemed to die feeling like he was still important and should be listened to.

This was a classic “Great Man” biography. He could have taught a MasterClass in political theater, and I understand why this is a big Zoom flex in 2020 for New York City wannabe Power Brokers. I learned a lot about how to Get Things Done a la Robert Moses, and I’m really glad to be done with this book.

**I also think the rating on this book is probably positively biased by people who are Moses fan boys, as if you aren’t into it, you’re probably dropping out before page 1,162. **

‘One measure of the career of Robert Moses is longevity. His power was measured in decades .’

Robert Moses (18 December 1888 – 29 July 1981) was, for over forty years, the most powerful public official in New York. This was despite the fact that he was never elected to public office. At one stage, he held twelve titles (including NYC Parks Commissioner and Chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission). Some of the public authorities he led (some of which he created) had such a high degree of autonomy from official scrutiny that he controlled millions of dollars with limited (if any) accountability. He was able to issue bonds to borrow huge amounts for new projects with limited (in any) input from legislative bodies.

‘The city might own the Triborough Bridge, but only the Triborough Bridge Authority could run it .’

In this book, which won both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parker Prizes, Robert Caro writes about how Robert Moses developed and applied his power. Robert Moses began as a reformer, over time he became an emperor. His public authorities operated as an unaccountable branch of government, controlling both state governors and mayors. How he did this makes for fascinating reading.

‘Parks, highways, urban renewal—Robert Moses was in and of himself a formative force in all three fields in the United States .’

I read that Robert Moses personally conceived and completed public works which cost 27 billion dollars. An incredible achievement. Those works included the Jones Beach, Fire Island, and Bethpage Parks, the Triborough, Throgs Neck, Henry Hudson, and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges, the Major Deegan, the Van Wyck, and the Long Island Expressways. But at what cost? Many people in New York were displaced by some of his expressway projects. Several of the bridges he built were not tall enough to enable buses to travel on the roads beneath them. Public transport was not a priority for Robert Moses, and consequently many people were unable to use some of the public recreation facilities he built.

‘When he replied to protests about the hardships caused by his roadbuilding programs, he generally replied that succeeding generations would be grateful. It was the end that counted, not the means .’

I came across Robert Moses in a book I was reading some years ago about New York. This book was recommended to me and while it’s taken me a while, I’m glad I read it. Mr Caro has provided a well-researched, easy to read account of Robert Moses and his power.

Students of public administration should read this book. As Lord Acton wrote in 1887: ‘Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely’.

Highly recommended.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Took me most of the year but I finished

If you only read one 1162-page book this year... read this one. Wow. Having just finished this, it's hard to say which achievement is more monumental: Robert Moses's commandeering of New York's byzantime infrastructure to serve his own ambitious vision--the book makes an open-and-shut case for Moses, whom many have never heard of and never served in public elected office, being the most important and powerful man in the history of New York--or Robert Caro's ability to write a definitive biography of this subject, spanning 50+ years, and unexpectedly detailing how New York works in the process.

If you have any interest in the 20th century history of New York, or in the practice of biography, this is the first book that should be on your list. Though some sections were undeniably slogs... in the end, this is a pretty fast-moving 1162-page book--the last 200, in particular flew by.

I'm so happy to be moving on to other, shorter books now. But I'm very happy that I read this: it reminds me that great writing and great research really can move mountains.

Hello, Goodreads. It’s me again. Yes, it took me eight months to read this book. But I promise I enjoyed it!

This is an incredibly detailed (even as 1200-page books go, this one is particularly dense) story about not just Robert Moses but about New York City, the nature of political power, and how democracy can transmogrify into tyranny. It successfully portrays municipal bureaucracy as a Shakespearean drama of ambition, ego, power, cravenness, and the inevitable fall. It’s the only book I’ve read that takes the building of an expressway and turns it into a heart-rending portrait of how hubris destroys the fabric of a neighborhood, and the lives of the people living there. And it shows you how a politician, despite never having been elected, can impose his misguided vision onto a city of 10M+ people.

But…wow it took a lot of words to do it. Maybe it really did need to be that long, and have that much detail, and cover the ideas from so many different angles. But maybe not! Or maybe I’m a baby who needs to appreciate the detail and the richness and just read faster and not take a months-long break when it gets particularly slow.

The good outshines the length and the density, and I’m glad I read it. I understand and appreciate much more about political power, urban planning, and the plight of the individual in the face of an unfeeling political machine.

PS - If you, like myself, want to take this very long book and make the reading experience even longer and more immersive, I recommend the 99% Invisible podcast series on The Power Broker as a companion to reading the book. It has great recaps, insights, and interviews. It is organized as 12 (also long, because how could they not be?) podcast episodes that accompany sections of the book. I got even more out of reading because I listened to the podcast along the way.