If there is one book you want read besides a religious book, I would make this that book.

We all have ideas, and very few of us ever even get to create a vision, but unless you have the power, it will go nowhere. For example, Steve Jobs didn't get Apple to be #1 because they out innovated others. It was because he had power. If you want to understand power, read this book, since it is so well written and researched. You get the feeling that Caro knew Moses better than he.


This book should be studied, not read. It has a lot in it to digest and will take a long time to finish. Caro is a great biographer (he is the author of LBJ biography). He makes Moses so alive that you get to know him well, and even start thinking like him. Moses for his many flaws also had many great attributes that Caro also covers.

Most people who obtain power will gloss over on how they obtained power and only reveal the positives, so we all end up thinking that powerful got there because they just did everything according to the book. Well, as you see in this book, powerful people make their rules.

This book uncovers the truth about power.

Let me state this bluntly that all powerful people are certified axxholes. Nobody gives you power charitably, you have to work hard to get it, and being nice does not fast track you to getting power; it makes you irrelevant quickly.

This book is so great (did I use this word again; disclaimer, I am not paid for this review) that you get a birds eye view of how this man achieved power, what he was able to do with power, how masterfully he kept on gaining more power and ultimately how he lost it.

Robert Moses wanted power for only one thing: to build highways, roads, bridges and parks. Building is what he loved doing and lived for. Nothing was going to get in his way. It was an obsession.

The sad part of Moses life was when he got old. He loved building bridges and highways so much that he allowed himself being hoodwinked by Nelson Rockefeller and Ronan into thinking that he was going to get a seat on the Board of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) that resulted from the merger of various Public Authorities.

He never got that and was given some powerless consultant position that just "killed" him.

After reading this book, one is likely to get very deep insight into how people acquire power and get addicted to power and ultimately get destroyed by continued lust for even more power. People with power never know when to give it up, and end up losing it ignobly.

The last part reminds me of the way Joe Paterno never could walk away from power and now is a pitiful character. Moses also was blinded by his power in how it affected ordinary people.

Will be reading this book again, since it is a must read book.

Since I first came to New York, I was looking out for a coup of Cairo's beloved biography of city builder/ruiner Robert Moses, which, half a century after its first printing, remains so popura that it literally took me five years of searching to find a copy of this massive, million word tome that didn’t cost 30$. It came too late. By the time I finally found one, and by the time I got around to reading the one I had found, I was getting ready to say goodbye to New York, putting my cheap furniture onto the stoop and saying whistful farewells to old watering holes. The 1200 very large pages of this tomes thus became a trial, an unhappy and despairing reminder of a place I loved and hated and am in any event leaving, of the endless catalog of errors that I made during my time here, of the occasional moments of happiness, more bitter still than my mistakes.
So, with the substantial caveat that my reading The Power Broker was an enormously elaborate exorcise in masochism, both figurative and literal (I consider myself something of a pack horse but having this brick in my backpack for last two weeks was half-crippling), what did I think of it? I thought it was too fucking long. Yup, that’s what I thought. It’s just too goddamn long. Moses was a fascinating figure and his impact on New York was enormous, but for a casual reader a lot of this stuff could be condensed. The beginning of the book, chronicling Moses’s transition from honest reformer to the power mad monster, is interesting, but once he makes that switch (around 1935, or so) the narrative starts to feel pretty repetitive. There’s something very personal to this biography – Cairo has a real sense of the injustices committed by Moses during his concrete transformation of New York, and a desire to tell the long untold stories of his victims. But it’s the same story, mostly, Moses using the powers he carefully accumulated and the indifference of the city and state elite to destroy nice things in New York and replace them with upper class amenities and hideous highways. Which is terrible and everything but basically it’s the same story whether its East Tremont or the Throggs Neck bridge or whatever, political chicanery leading to the eradication of natural beauty and the destruction of all things good. Will I keep it? No, I’m not gonna fucking keep it, it’s heavy as sin and I’m through with New York anyway, man, I’m done, I’m gone, you gone have her, I don’t miss her, I won’t think about her at night, I won’t count her hideous flaws as secret virtues, I won’t let her grit down in my soul. Editors Note: Nah, fuck it, I'm keeping this one.

Can a book be both endlessly enthralling and gratuitously tedious simultaneously? Apparently, it can.

They say that biographers identify with their subject, and Robert Caro was not untouched by the megalomania that drove Robert Moses. The worst problem was his tendency to belabor his points, as if his readers were slightly dim and couldn't be trusted to get a point the first time, or remember it. How many times should it be necessary to say that the West Side Highway would cut off New Yorkers' access to the Hudson forever? The repetition of his points about Moses and power, how he got it, maintained it, and exercised it, was mind-numbing. It extended to little things, too. Numbers in the hundreds of millions don't have to be carried out to the last dollar. Lists of playgrounds, roads, buildings, and so forth were stultifying. Even when Homer does it, my eye glances it over it, and Caro's not quite Homer; and since I was listening and not reading, I had to hear every single last one. It was unconscionable in a book clocking over 1300 pages. Megalomania. Moses would have understood, even as he raged over the analysis.

That out of the way, as the ratings and reviews attest, this was engrossing and a testimony to Caro's research and ability to write a story that kept drawing you on. There's nothing for me to add. For anyone with an interest in New York, urban planning and development, the sociology of power, or the nature of evil, it's a mandatory, if lengthy, read. It took me two months to listen to it.

1162 pages of well researched text is what Robert Caro uses to tell the story of planner and political power Robert Moses. Over decades of service, Moses reshaped New York (both the city and the state) and other public structures. He began as a reformer; over time, he arrogated more and more power to himself--and still remained rather out of sight as a figure. He used his power sometimes unconcerned about the implications for citizens. The Cross-Bronx Expressway, for instance, displaced many people. How could he remain for so long a period of time as "below the radar"? He was not an elected official; he served on public authorities, which often have full governmental powers.

His list of public works is extraordinary. The Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Long Island Expressway, and many others. Bridges? The Triborough, the Throgs Neck, the Henry Hudson, the Bronx-Whitestone, among others. He created parks such as Jones Beach, Fire Island, and Bethpage. He built buildings--some for the poor, some for the wealthy. He created stadiums (such as Shea). He had dams along the St. Lawrence River created; there is a large power plant along the Niagara River. And on the listing goes.

A must read for those interested in Moses and in the power of public authorities. . . .

I have read some amazing books over the past 30 years. For a long time Neil Sheehan's "A Bright and Shining Lie" was my all time favorite because it grabbed me in a way that no other work had until then (1989). It unwrapped the Vietnam war in a way that had not been unwrapped for me until then, and Sheehan's story of his hero's personal struggles, his rise and fall is forever ingrained in me as a lesson in the interchange between man and war. Gibbons Rise and Fall, Thucydides, Halberstam's , "The Children", Taylor Branch's civil rights trilogy and Caro's epic about Johnson all captured and held me with amazing stories and storytelling about special individuals who stood out from the crowd for one reason or another to change the world around them. This volume, perhaps Caro's masterpiece, as others have described it, is I believe first among equals among the greatest in my experience. It is less a biography than an epic, at times Homeric in its ability to get uncover the not so mysterious drive of its central character, the man who could make things happen, Robert Moses.
I wrote in my updates some of my feelings while reading it, and a life long New Yorker I felt that reading this book opened up the history and inner workings of my hometown in a way that no other story has done so far. I just can't believe I waited this long (40 years) to read it. Nonetheless, this is a GREAT book, it should be required reading , or at least parts of it , for all New Yorkers native or not, so that there next drive down the FDR or up the Henry Hudson Parkway , or their next visit to Jones Beach becomes not just a stream of cars on the way somewhere but a reconstruction of a time long ago when New York as it exists today did not exist. As damaged and dangerous as he was, Bob Moses created the New York that exists today, the good the bad and the ugly. His legacy is in millions of tons of concrete still connecting the boroughs together as well as the uglier and perhaps unnecessary damage done to people and neighborhoods and to city's fabric by his egomaniacal focus on getting things done.
If I could give Caro 6 stars I would !!

In early 2012 on a business trip to NYC, I was driving on Long Island Expressway for the first time when an odd and seemingly unnecessary bend in the road got my curiousity. Searching for the answer later in the day brought me to Robert Moses, which then brought me to this book, and as much as I loved this behemoth, I'm still trying to figure out if I'm in a better place viz-a-viz humanity for having read it.

Want to read a good horror book? Forget the kings of the genre in fiction, Caro has served up a page-turning, real life horror story with a haunting over millions of people that could conceivably last forever. I love New York City, and the more I read of this masterpiece, the more I found myself needing to walk away from the book - sometimes for weeks at a time - to deal with the subject matter. Moses wasn't just a Grade-A Asshole, he was the Antichrist of Architecture. How is it even possible that in the 20th century, in one of the greatest cities in the world, that one man could garner so much power and then weild it for 40 years? Yes, I know, American politics and American politicians are a mess (as they are everywhere arond the world where power is to be had), but 40+ YEARS! Chapter after chapter of amazingly researched and detailed depictions of Moses's malfeasance makes the reader shake his/her head and wonder how this could possibly have happened. And then you visit the places that Moses ruined, sit in the traffic that is a direct by-product of his lack of vision, and you realize that the Horror of the book is something that we get to live - for countless generations.

Can I recommend this book? I can, but with a caveat. The truth in the pages won't set you free. At best it will break your heart, at its worst you will wonder with the advances of science and the prolongation of life - what is going to happen one day when the really, really evil bastards of this world get to live to be 200? Can we survive that?

Recommended to me by David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

DREAMS—visions of public works on a noble scale—had been marching through Bob Moses’ mind in almost continuous procession for a decade and more. Not one of them had marched out of his mind into reality.

But during that decade, Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power.

And now he grabbed for power with both hands.

To free his hands for the grab, he shook impatiently from them the last crumbs of the principles with which he had entered public service and for which, during the years of his idealism, he had fought so hard.
(Page 172)

And power feeds arrogance.
(Page 242)

At 1162 pages of dense text this is a beast of a book. It is ostensibly a biography of Robert Moses, but could be viewed as a book about power and arrogance. We do meet several important historical figures from this era: Al Smith (the Happy Warrior), Franklin Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia (the Little Flower), Nelson Rockefeller, and others. However, the focus of the book is on Robert Moses, a Park Commissioner who was responsible for many of the parks, highways, and bridges in both the state and the city of New York. He saw Long Island as a fresh air refuge for the masses of New York City, but those masses did not include Blacks and Puerto Ricans. His concern was for only the wealthy and the comfortable middle-class, essentially those who could afford to buy a car.

As a Yale and Oxford educated young man he became part of the Good Government movement during the reform age. He wrote a paper describing how the government of New York could be reorganized to combat the corruption of Tammany Hall.

The paper and its ideas were adopted by Al Smith when he was first elected governor of New York. Smith brought Moses to Albany to write the bills for the legislature to implement his ideas. He became known as the best bill writer in the state. After becoming Parks Commissioner he wrote many of the bills for his position. In these bills he buried rules which eventually helped him accumulate and hold absolute power over the parks. These rules provided that his position was neither an elected official nor could he be fired by any elected official.

The story is more about the power that Moses had as Parks Commissioner and the arrogance he developed as a result of that power. Power was his narcotic and he grew very dependent on his exercise of that power. Moses did a brilliant job cultivating his image as a public servant above the dirty politics, one who was apolitical and with no concern for money. He had banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, and even the Church on his side. He was accountable to no-one, neither mayors, governors, nor even the President of the United States.

His results included many parks, highways and bridges, some of which required disrupting families and communities. He would tolerate no objections to his plans for the city. His plans were for people driving cars. It was apparent early on to many people that his highways and bridges did not solve New York’s traffic problems and in fact aggravated them. He would not consider and did nothing about public transportation thinking that was for poor people. He deliberately designed obstacles to prevent buses and subways form accessing his parks.

This book did not need to be this long and it demands a lot of time and devotion. The book is bloated by Caro’s extensive research and his reporting of very detail. Robert Caro is a well-known, respected historian. Other writers are described as "Caro-esque" for their own extensive research and detail. We get a section describing the geography of Long Island. We get a long section describing many of the physical characteristics of Robert Moses. We get almost day-by day accounts of his battles with opponents of his plans. Over and over we get descriptions of his intensive work habits and his expecting and driving the same work habits from his staff.

Overall I did not find this book a valuable read. There was very little history that was relevant or interesting to me. I wish someone would explain to me why I would take six weeks to read this book when I have so many books currently sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read, and literally a hundred or more that I want to someday buy and read.

Although it does look impressive sitting in my bookcase.

This biography of Robert Moses—the highly influential urban planner who shaped the modern city during the 20th century—was first published in 1975, during a period of prolonged urban decline, adding another layer of complexity for today’s reader.

Wow, hands down the best nonfiction book I’ve ever read. I felt like I was right there with Robert Moses as he maneuvered his way into power behind closed doors, a remarkable work of research and storytelling. The sentences leapt off the page! I’m particularly impressed by Caro’s frankness in how Robert Moses did a lot of truly incredible things for New York City, while also doing some really terrible things to accomplish his vision. His rise and his fall were my favorite parts, especially the ending. Wow. Four months well spent!

Power must be limited, no matter who the individual. We all believe we have the right view of things and that means we disagree with each other. The conflict normally results in a contest to determine the best course of action. What ends up being done may not be the ideal, but it does accommodate multiple views.

When one person has freedom to do whatever he/she pleases then people are going to be hurt. Even if power did not corrupt, it would, as this book shows, completely ignore groups of people to the point of devastating lives.

The sole virtue of unrestrained power is it gets things done, whether or not they are what should be done. Hitler did marvels for Germany before he destroyed it. Jeff Bezos can spend $1 billion a year on space tourism as so many Americans go homeless and his workers cannot get $15 an hour for their labor.

Robert Moses was a genius in several ways. He was a master at engineering without ever taking a course in it, a quick learner, a great judge of talent, an inspiring team leader, insatiably curious, unmatched in writing legislation, willing to work any and all hours to get something done with a physical constitution that would not quit, marvelous at planning down to the smallest detail and able to manage multiple projects at one time driving each one to completion.

But he had three serious flaws. He would not listen to others, always insisting on doing things his own way. He was supremely arrogant; openly contemptuous of anyone who disagreed with him taking real pleasure in dishing out humiliation. Worst of all, while deeply involved in public projects he had no feeling for the public and would drive his projects through regardless of the effect on the people whose lives would be shattered by them. He wanted monuments to himself and created them one after another for decades overcoming all obstacles financial and political to do so.

A Rhodes Scholar, Moses wrote his thesis at Oxford on the British civil service then upon return to the United States joined the movement for reform in New York state that saw him design a makeover of the state civil service, the details of which allowed him to work that system to his advantage including the writing of legislation creating the first public authority with him in charge and, once appointed, unable to be removed. When threatened with dismissal he would advise the one threatening him to check the law. End of threat. Even FDR as president was unable to dislodge Moses, and was barely able to stop one of Moses' bridges.

Governors and mayors came and went while Moses remained in his positions, heading up 12 government bodies at the peak of his power. Starting in the late 1920's with the public pleasing development of Jones Beach on Long Island including parkways to allow access to it by car, he rode a wave of popularity with the public as the man who got things done even as his building of expressways within NYC did nothing to improve traffic jams as he ignored the crying need for rail improvements.

In the 1930's he built the Triborough Bridge, an engineering marvel tolls from which allowed him sole authority over millions of dollars annually. The Depression starved state and city funds, but Moses had the toll money that could be capitalized into bonds that would provide collateral to fund park and highway building, but only as he dictated it be done. And if neighborhoods were destroyed and people evicted left and right from their apartments to make way for six lane expressways, so be it.

While obsessed with power, Moses cared little for what money could buy for him personally. Not only was he seen as the master builder, but one who was incorruptible. His secret was in commissioning companies, unions and individuals with generous contracts that bound their loyalty to him. Any objections to his plans by elected officials brought a barrage of protest from the movers and shakers of the city and state.

The Power Broker is an account of the 45 years of Moses reign. Though it is 1200 pages long, my interest flagged at only one point with a detailed description of NYC borough politics. It is fascinating to see one politician after another step up to challenge Moses, even if in a minor way, only to face humiliation demanding cooperation with him. Moses made a point of having mayors meet with him at places and times of his own choosing. Heart rending accounts of people losing everything to make way for Moses' highways show how far removed he was from public pressure. He ran for governor of New York only to be resoundingly defeated due to his arrogant attitude toward the public that he should have been wooing.

The book was published in 1975 six years before Moses died, completed only after the author was rebuffed by him. This biography of a man who lived to the age of 93 proves that some people can face incredible stress every day for decades yet thrive. Robert Moses made NYC what we know today, still congested with a teetering public transportation system despite all the expressways, bridges and tunnels that he built.

Robert Moses was a force of nature. As a man, he did more to shape NYC than any other person, and his actions/ideas propagated across North America via copycat planners and engineers. For better or for worse, the US and Canada would not look the way they do now if he had not existed.

He knew exactly how to get shit done. Fast. Acquire power by any means necessary, know the law better than anyone (and how to break it), show plans not proposals, and get shovels in the ground.

His character as a man is almost irrelevant, because his impact is so obviously felt through his constructions. Unfortunately his unsavory character shows in the planning itself. His seemingly arbitrary dislike of public transit is perhaps the most heartbreaking - only surpassed by his cruelty towards the poor and people or colour. It is summed well by Robert Caro when he says "He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons - just to make it a better public." Moses's disconnection from the individuals he was building for may be the root of the destruction he caused - but perhaps this aspect of his personality can't be isolated and cut away, it might be integral to his existence.

After 6 months and 1200 pages, I still don't know if Robert Moses was "good" or "bad". Some of his actions and constructions are admirable or even venerable - and his outmaneuvering of the robber barons on Long Island had me cheering. However, 2 pages later he does the same thing to a small family farm next door and the reality of the man returns. His treatment of family and longtime partners is nasty, and his lack of compassion towards the less-fortunate and the neighborhoods they call home is tragic.

The Power Broker is certainly the best biography I have ever read (or listened to - this was a 66 hour audiobook). It is as much a biography of Al Smith, FDR, Fiorello La Guardia, and many other public servants as it is about Robert Moses. The writing is phenomenal, the research goes deeper than I could have imagined possible, and Robert Caro's humanity shows on every page. A masterpiece.