It took me almost half of a year, but I did it--I finished "The Power Broker." In many ways, this book feels like the nonfiction "Infinite Jest," a rite of passage for all serious readers and a shibboleth of dilettante scholars of urban life such as myself. I feel accomplished!

Based on my reading history, it is not difficult to tell that I'm a bit of a mass transportation enthusiast. When I first moved to New York I lived on the Lower East Side, at the mercy of the unpredictable F and erstwhile V trains, which usually didn't go where I wanted to go. So when I moved to Crown Heights thereafter and had either the 2/3/4/5 IRT lines or the IND Fulton C line at my disposal, it felt like the entirety of New York City had opened up to me, even as I decamped for the beginning of my continued foray into "Outer Borough" life. I left New York for law school and found my way back to Brooklyn, and I live in the neighborhood with the most subway options in the entire city, save Times Square, though the latter is more accurately described as a superterranean circle of Hell than a neighborhood. While my Brooklyn neighborhood has umpteen other charms, the subway options were why I moved here and they're a huge component of my decision to stay when I had to move earlier this year.

It's kind of weird to call yourself an enthusiast for the subways in a city where the favored pastime is measuring your weekly grievances against the MTA. It can't be denied that the system is outdated, poorly maintained, impossibly expensive, overcrowded, glitchy, dirty, and unreliable. But like the canals of Venice and the layout of Machu Picchu, imperfection does not preclude wonder. Due to a variety of geological, developmental, and riparian factors, New York is one of the most difficult and expensive places in the world to perform underground construction. Nevertheless, it has built a system that is one of the most expansive in the world when measured by number of stations, track mileage, or ridership.

Still, when you look at a spatially accurate map of the subway superimposed on the city, the lacunae are great--and greatly regrettable. Queens, almost entirely unpopulated until the early 20th Century, and therefore an excellent candidate for massive subway expansion, is only lightly dappled with subway access; huge swathes of outer Brooklyn, New York's most populous borough, are denied viable subway options; even gigantic portions of Manhattan are bereft, leading many to forget that the island has quite a bit of waistline extending beyond 8th Avenue. In the binary of subway access that has ensued, the rich tend to congregate around subway stops, while the poor and displaced--formerly locked into squalid city centers--have the difficulty of extended commutes and uncoordinated transfers added to their sizable burdens now that inner cities have become hypersafe playgrounds for the wealthy. Denizens of vehicular pseudo-suburbs in places like Queens, where subway access was repeatedly choked off, reap the advantages of the city without exposure to the shared living that urban life entails and which in turn fosters a sense of community and obligation, leading to curious redoubts of ethnic isolation, wealth, and conservatism in the world's most linguistically and ethnically diverse county.

Lest I expatiate on the subway any longer in a review of a book dealing mostly with roads and parks, I will try to get to the point: As much as I love the cheap and wide-ranging access of the tremendously flawed NYC subway system, I harbor an unusual wistfulness for its lost potential. New York runs the way it does because of the subway, and I wonder how many ills--hyperintense gentrification spurred whenever any reasonably-accessible neighborhood gets sufficiently safe, the criminalization of the working poor who cannot afford to commute, the pollution and diseconomies of space that car culture effect, etc.--could have been avoided or mitigated if subway access were truly comprehensive. To this end, I have spent untold hours mourning the failure of ambitious plans in the past, the provisions for connections optimistically but purposelessly built, the unrealized proposals of entirely new trunk lines articulated in a time when development and infrastructure did not make them prohibitively expensive. There are many, many factors to blame for these scuppered dreams, but the one that repeats like a mantra from students of New York's subway history is none other than this book's antihero: Robert Moses.

Moses, if nothing else, was a dynamo. He had superhuman intelligence, strength, will, confidence, and determination. Truly, one wonders were it not for his being Jewish in a more anti-Semitic age whether he would have become an elected official at the national level. He was born into wealthy circumstances and had all the advantages that wealth could endow, but aside from this huge thumb on the scale he was just a preternaturally magnetic, impressive, and capable person.

"The Power Broker" tells of Moses' idiosyncrasies and traits: his refusal to compromise, his mystifying ability to withstand the broadsides and enmities of mayors, governors, and even popular wartime presidents like FDR, and his primadonna tendencies. It explores the less than ethical and forthright ways in which Moses shored up and retained power, and his main tactic for building his mighty public works: over-promise on results, under-budget the costs, and prey on politicians' sense of failure to ensure that something once promised gets delivered, even if it requires multipliers of initial cost estimates. The book also alludes to Moses' racist and classist tendencies--his cooling by a few degrees of the temperatures of the public pools he built in white neighborhoods rimmed by pockets of Puerto Ricans and Blacks in the hope and under the impression that non-white people were constitutionally repelled by cool waters that whites were better able to endure; his quixotic war on Shakespeare in the Park, which he didn't believe poor people needed or could appreciate; and his busing and relatively meager accommodations for black New Yorkers. All in all, he seems to have been an impressive but unpleasant man who had an extremely particular and narrow view of what was best for the world and pursued the reification of that view with boundless zeal and undaunted determination.

And that's perhaps what is most striking about Moses. He was raised in the idealist tradition, by all accounts disproportionately influenced by his overbearing and talented mother and grandmother, who believed in social progress, but of a very specific type. Moses was not an evil man in most ways, he just really thought that landscaped roadways were the best ways to satisfy human needs for transportation while also giving "lungs" to the congested and miasmatic city. He didn't destroy entire swathes of the South Bronx out of spite, he did it because he believed that it was most conducive to the transit needs of the entirety of New York state. And much as it pains me to say it, when Moses refused to buy the right of way for future subway arteries in Queens, despite the knowledge that these rights of way would cost 10x as much a decade hence and using the cheeky excuse that doing so would put his project overbudget and destroy communities in the process, he did so because he earnestly believed that subways were a horrible way to travel, and that driving in a car was a luxury experience that should be--and someday would be--enjoyed by the great majority of New Yorkers. Being rich and too industrious to ever drive himself, he nurtured this mystifying view throughout his life, not really ever grasping the agony of a traffic jam or the pain of finding a parking spot in Lower Manhattan.

And so, just as I mourn the lost potential of the New York City subway system, I also mourn the lost potential of so powerful and impressive an individual as was Robert Moses, who could have achieved so much good if only he were instructed or sympathetic to the needs of a modern, global city. It is almost unquestionable that without a transit coordinator as powerful and hostile to subways as Moses was during that fecund period of subway construction, the subway network would be more expansive and suffer far less from the maladies attributed to it above. And imagine that, in addition to that barrier neutralized, what the system could look like in a world where Moses was its advocate! It's true that, having laid fallow in a time when the political will and practical possibility coexisted, so many plans for subway construction will likely never be resurrected. After all, New York's only really ambitious construction over the past few decades has been the 7 train extension--an addition of a single stop at a cost of over $1B, and the reinvigoration of the Second Avenue Subway, a line in the making for over a century that only just opened up its first three stops, and which is currently costing well over $2B per mile (the next closest rate is $400M per mile, the cost to construct subways in waterlogged Amsterdam) and not scheduled to be fully completed until likely the 2040s. While some think the completion of a portion of the Second Avenue line augurs well for future subway expansion, its difficulties, costs, and duration instead seem to signal that such ambitious projects need to be relegated to the realm of impossibility and impracticality. And this, sadly, as rapid bus services languish, as ferries fail to put a serious dent in ridership, and as rush hour trains go by 3, 4, 5, times before a passenger can squeeze on in increasingly bizarre positionings and uncomfortable proximities to complete strangers.

As I recall from Catholic school, the prophet Moses heralded the Savior. Perhaps we'll all be surprised and a savior of New York's mass transit woes will yet arrive. Until then, you can find me on the IND Lafayette Avenue local, lodged in a tunnel and waiting for an A express train to pass, wistfully wondering about what might have been...

I cannot WAIT to brag about reading this book at all the black tie cocktail parties

This book is a very long, thorough, exhaustive and phenomenal account of the man who made the public works systems and housing and parks in New York City what they are today. It deservedly won the author the Pullitzer for literature.

Are Moses' accomplishments good or bad?

Robert Moses grew up in a household run by his mother, who had fierce opinions about fighting for the underdog. She raised her children to think like her, at least she expected them to. Robert Moses did, his brother did not, the sister did but wasn't useful. Therefore Robert got every single dime that his passive father made, which was a lot, and his siblings got absolutely nothing.

This arrogance and drive put Moses through Ivy League, Oxford and made him a prominent administrator over New York City's parks, housing and city transportation systems.

Caro's book gives a real insight into how politics and the power mongers who use politics work and think. Moses spent hours and months looking at all the laws and by laws on the books. He found obsolete rulings and used them to get himself in an un-elected position of power that had no expiration date.

He used people and developed a gigantic entourage that supported his power, and tirelessly and relentlessly held power over everyone from the governor of the state to the mayor of New York city.

But what really allowed him to become the despot over New York was the press. I found this interesting. If the press is on your side, it does not matter if you're a saint or a monster, people will take their cues from what the newspapers' slant is. The New York papers always slanted in Moses' favor.

What I also found fascinating is how brutal Moses could be towards anyone who did not allow him what he wanted and how vengeful as well, yet he had loyal followers who genuinely believed that Moses was all he claimed to be, i.e. the "Savior" of New York. These men, or dupes, if you will, kept Moses in power for decades. By the time any of them wised up, they had no power or were useless to Moses and he discarded them.

First Moses ousted the Old Money that owned private property on Long Island and made it public property. He did this forcefully and gracelessly and not legally. And he got away with it for the above mentioned reasons. But his official response was that he was doing it for the common worker who lived in New York and had no beach to go to on the weekends. He used this excuse for the entire time he tore down property, built up parking lots, highways, created car to car traffic congestion and, let us not forget, pricey admission prices to access the beaches that eliminated the average New York middle class worker.

He did the same with bridges and highways. Instead of building them along deserted areas with empty tenement buildings, of which, New York had more than a few, he chose to build them in thriving neighborhoods, effectively ousting tenants and turning the neighborhoods into dangerous ghettos. He did this all over New York. Digging up parks, robbing families of what little resources they had to take their children to play.

Under the guise of "renovating" neighborhoods, Moses created a horrible homeless population and also isolated poor neighborhoods, condemning them to the category of ghettos. Jane Jacobs discusses this in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. By destroying, self-sustaining, vibrant neighborhoods, Moses was instrumental in creating grey, dead tenement neighborhoods where crime moved in and those who could afford to, moved out.

What's frustrating is how much of it was avoidable if Moses had made his highways and bridges in other unpopulated areas. But Moses marched to his own drum.

And he could be vindictive. Someone ticked him off about the Brooklyn Aquarium and Park and he effectively bankrupted them. The reason? Because no one messes with Robert Moses.

This went on for decades. We think of despots running third world politics. It also runs on smaller scales in cities and towns. It's not about money; it's about power.

Moses' downfall finally came in the sixties when Nelson Rockefeller became governor. Rockefeller did not need Moses' money and he was young and arrogant and Moses couldn't push him around. There was a new sheriff in town. Little by little, Rockefeller plucked every piece of development that was under Moses' authority.

He was finally left with running the World's Fair in Queen's and it was a dismal failure. Moses thought the could push around delegates from other countries as he could officials in New York. Hardly anyone from Europe came.

Moses' private life wasn't much better. His wife and daughters were so neglected that they eventually fell from view altogether. His wife became such an embarrassing alcoholic that he stopped bringing her to dinner parties. Instead he brought his mistress, whom he married a few months after his wife finally died.

As hateful as Moses was, and it certainly helps explain the traffic situation in the Northeast, this book was such an eye-opener as to how politics work. It's not the elected officials you have to worry about so much as the ones that acquire their own little dictatorships.

I would be interested in reading a good book as to what New York has done since the early seventies in an attempt to rectify any of the damage this one man incurred on one of the greatest cities in the world.

The ultimate in investigative reporting - a history so well written, so thorough, so deep and with so many takeaways that it is beyond thought provoking. It changes the way you perceive the world. Caro shows how money, politics and power work behind the scenes to determine events in ways we ordinarily never see. He meticulously details a half century of greed and ambition ever evolving to control government from one generation to the next, from one set of power brokers to the next.

We learn how Robert Moses begins with values, ideals and dreams, with ambition and drive. As he pushes his new ideas forward he runs into the establishment, an entrenched society based on wealth and connections. His only way forward is to compromise, to manipulate the system the same way the establishment does. He then tastes power and it becomes his crack cocaine. His fix is facilitated by playing up to or paying off those he needs, rewarding those who fall in line, humiliating and ruining those in his way and forgetting the rest. Money, intimidation, threats, lies and deceit get things done. His dreams survive, but his values don’t. Robert Moses’ story exposes the raw nature of politics and its practitioners revealing a stark brutal reality.

While the author belabors some points, Caro’s biography never ceases to be enthralling and it always feels authentic. FDR, Nelson Rockefeller, Fiorello La Gaurdia, Al Smith, and every other politician that had anything to do with New York from 1920 to 1970 is there. And we are there, witnessing corruption of both the body politic and the human spirit. We live through the fascinating life of the ruthless genius who built so much of modern New York. We follow him from the bottom to the top and down to the bottom again. We see how generational ideals outlive their relevance in a rapidly changing world and how power based on new paradigms replaces old. But the game stays the same. The times and people change. The politics and human nature don’t.

Robert A. Caro know a lot of words, but concise sure as fuck isn't one of them.

Did this book end me, or did I end it?

I think the former is probably more true than the latter, because while I certainly finished it, there was a cost. 60 hours of audiobook, in three separate volumes, and granted I listen at 2x and higher speeds, but it was so long and in such ass-bleeding detail and Caro has a lot of repetitive linguistic flourishes that got old really fast.

Regardless, it's a scathing take-down—with receipts—of a man who grasped for and gained absolute power in a quest to shape the world as he saw fit...fucking literally everyone else over in his quixotic vision of greatness and glory. So much of Moses' legacy lives on and is slowly being fixed in NYC, but he done fucked up the city.

At long last, completed this gargantua. A masterful portrait of a singularly obsessed individual and the corrosive influence of power.

Not as good as the LBJ books—weirdly discursive for long stretches, flamboyant, poorly paced. But, my goodness, the research that went into this!

Often the things that interested me most were happening “off screen” or were downplayed in the text. How Moses started off as a reformer, his relationship with his children, his fiction writing pastime, what he was up to building those roads in South America.

I learned a lot. Will never look at Fort Clinton or the Henry Hudson the same way again. Or much of Long Island, Flushing, etc.

Phew

Wow. 1,336 pages / 68 hours in audiobook.

Listened for 5 hours a day on my honeymoon with my husband because what could be more romantic? Although the real love story here is between Al Smith and Bob Moses (Moses refused to call anyone else “governor” and gave Smith his own personal key to the Central Park Zoo in a plot line reminiscent of a rom com) and between Al Smith and Robert Caro (Caro devoted a full chapter to Smith’s life story in a biography about someone else). Everybody loves Al Smith.

I was inspired to finally tackle this book in 2024 because of the Roman Mars podcast 99% Invisible, which released an episode a month to celebrate the book’s 50 year anniversary this year. The podcast added so much to my enjoyment of the book. Did you know the creator of Parks and Rec has read this book 3x and based Amy Poehler’s character on a less evil Bob Moses??

We call him:
Bobby Mo
Bob the Builder
Bob the Weasel
Big RM

4 stars because:
- Did not need to know the geological history of Long Island
- Lagged in the middle third with too many gargantuan chapters called “Changing” where Bob was drunk on power and built more roads
- I know Bob Caro is still mad about his editor making this book shorter but it is still just so so long

A few other notes:
- RIP Mrs. Moskowitz who did not get a fitting goodbye
- FDR and Bob Moses being so petty
- Moses hates tunnels (bathroom for cars) but wow does this man love cars

Shoutout “the author” whose research prowess and diligence are simply unmatched. How he wrote this in just 7 years without the internet is staggering. He even brought his own lightbulb to the basement archives when Moses affiliates stole the lights to try and block Caro’s progress on this book. The ending sentences of his chapters are works of art.

Finishing this book is a (once in a) lifetime achievement.

“As the families drove, they could see on either side of them, through gates set in stone walls or through the openings in wooden fences, the beautiful meadows they had come for, stretching endlessly and emptily to the cool trees beyond. But the meadows and trees were not for them. The gates would be locked and men carrying shotguns and holding fierce dogs on straining leashes would point eastward, telling the families there were parks open to them ‘farther along.’ There was no shade on Northern Boulevard and the children became cranky early. In desperation, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING – PRIVATE PROPERTY signs that lined the road, fathers would turn onto the narrow strip of grass between the boulevard and the wall paralleling it and, despite the dust and the fumes from the passing cars, would try to picnic there. But there guards were vigilant and it was never long until the fathers had to tell the kids to get back into the car. Later, in Oyster Bay Town and Huntington, they would come to parks, tiny but nonetheless parks, but as they approached them they would see policemen at their entrances and the policemen would wave them on, explaining that they were reserved for township residents. There were, the policemen shouted, parks open ‘further along…’”
-tRobert Caro, The Power Broker

At nearly 1,200 pages of text (not including endnotes and the index), Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is a huge book. Despite its uniformly excellent quality – its Pulitzer Prize is well deserved – I felt every single one of those pages. More than that, my back started feeling the strain of hauling this around.

The problem is not quality. Not even close. The quality here is unparalleled. The reason, at least partly, is that this is not the typical biography I am used to reading. Usually, if I’m going to plow through a thousand pages or more on a person’s life, that life has to be on par with Napoleon.

This is not about Napoleon, by the way.

Rather, the subject of Caro’s intense focus is Robert Moses.

Moses was not a president or national-leader, a battlefield general, a religious figure, or a world-historical mover and shaker. Moses was never elected to public office or explored an unexplored region or climbed a mountain or mapped a river or wrestled a shark. He never held his breath for more than a minute or invented a new fitness routine. He did not set world records for eating hot dogs on the Fourth of July. He did not win the Boston Marathon, the Super Bowl, or the World Cup.

No, Robert Moses’s immediate impact was purely local. And even though that locality happened to be New York City – one of the greatest cities in the world – he is still rather an unknown, unless you are a student of urban planning. His legacy was building parks and expressways. He is remembered as the man who shaped and (according to Caro) destroyed (at least for a time) New York City. But he wasn’t even an architect or an engineer.

Rather, Robert Moses was that most interesting species of mankind: a bureaucrat.

That’s right. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is a 1,200 page tome on the life of the ultimate functionary. You want red tape? You want zoning rules? You want arcane statutes? You want to learn everything you need to know about the semi-public, semi-private nature of City Authorities? You’ve got them!

If you are a normal person, you’ve already stopped reading. But that’s not my intent. Because The Power Broker is more than Robert Moses. It’s the story of a city.

Still, Caro begins and ends with the man. So who was he? Well, he’s a little like Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, except also a terrible racist. That, at least, is the short version. But this is Robert Caro, so strap in for the long version.

Robert Moses did not begin how he ended. In the start, as Caro shows, the young Moses was a reformer and an idealist. Born into modest wealth, he attended Yale and Oxford and studied city planning. When he returned to New York City from overseas, he took a job trying to fix the City’s patronage system. Though he made little money and had little power, he was tireless and undaunted and dedicated. All in all, he seemed a good sort. The kind out to change the world for the better.

That all ends around page 200.

Moses’s talents were recognized by Belle Moskowitz, an advisor to eventual New York Governor Al Smith. Moses goes to Albany where he attains a talent for drafting legislation. He uses that talent to craft laws creating Commissions with extremely powerful Commissioners. And then he got himself appointed to those Commissions.

The rest…is a very long book.

Not surprisingly for a man thousands of pages deep into a multi-volume Lyndon Johnson biography, Caro is obsessed with the attainment and use of power. To that end, he structures the The Power Broke like a three act play, highlighting Moses’s rise to power, his exercise of power, and his loss of power. I’d like to explain what that all means in more specific terms, but frankly, I can’t. Explaining Moses’s career literally takes 1,200 pages.

Oh, what the heck. I’ll give it a try.

In the simplest terms, Moses used his various Commissionerships, imbued with authority that he wrote into the laws himself, to undertake massive public projects, such as Jones Beach and the Long Island Expressways. In the beginning, these projects were hugely popular with the public. With the populace and the newspapers behind him, Moses felt comfortable taking bigger risks and funding bigger projects. And no one could stop him. Due to the staggered terms of these various posts, Moses found himself able to leverage his authority in such a way that he outlasted dozens of mayors and governors, none of whom could afford to anger him. From the 1920s to 1968, Moses reigned supreme as the shaper of New York City. His vision of New York City became the vision of New York City. He drove expressways through neighborhoods; he built bridges and roads rather than subways; he ran the Triborough Authority like an emperor, chauffeured about in a black limousine. He wasn’t a crook and he never used his power to enrich himself. For him, the power was the juice (though of course he certainly enriched hundreds and thousands of others at taxpayer expense).

Part of the reason why this book took me so long to read what that I had to spend so much time with Moses. It can be a drag. Unlike Caro’s other biographical subject, Lyndon Johnson, Moses never used his power for a greater good. He had no Great Society. Instead, Moses becomes a worse human with each turn of the page. In the beginning, at least, as State Park Commissioner, Moses actually worked for the common man, breaking the grip on Long Island of the wealthy estate owners. As time went on, however, Moses lost all compassion for ordinary folk; lost all compassion whatsoever. He seemed to exercise power only for the sake of power. He did things because he had it in his mind to do them.

To be sure, Caro’s achievement and Moses’s “achievements” need to be separated. I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t like The Power Broker simply because Robert Moses was an enormous ass. That’s not the case. To the contrary, The Power Broker may be the best one-volume biography I’ve ever read. There are so many superlatives, I don’t know where to begin.

Let’s start with the fundamentals: the quality of the writing. Caro is a great writer. I don’t know how to put it better than that. He writes with elegance, he writes with clarity, and he structures his sentences and his paragraphs in such a way as to heighten the dramatic effect. Caro packs in so much detail, without confusing the reader, that I got exhausted imagining the effort it took to maintain this style. His writing is helped by his sensitivity; he manages to find and inject humanity into his subjects. Moses was a jerk, but a human one. Caro also is a master of context, giving the supporting characters as much depth as the lead actor.

I also loved Caro’s literary set-pieces. In most books, if there’s a problem to be solved by the protagonist, the author would simply say: “here’s the problem.” Caro is too imaginative for that. He does an amazing job describing the paradigm in Robert Moses created his public works. For instance, early in the book, Caro describes Moses’s attempts to create public beaches on Long Island taking you – the reader – on an imagine car ride that shows you every mile of the trip, illustrating the difficulties of a middle class family attempting to get to a Long Island beach in the 1930s. (This is where the opening excerpt came from).

Later in the book, when Moses is trying to plow under a neighborhood for one of his expressways, Caro tries to show you what that meant for the people who lived in the bulldozer’s path. Instead of giving you cold hard facts – the number of people, the number of apartments, the basic demographics – Caro devotes an entire chapter to one square mile slated to be destroyed. He interviews the residents, describes their lives, and tells of their ill-fated fight against Moses. This case study is an incredibly effective way to personalize the stakes between Moses the Builder and the People.

This dovetails with my next point: Caro can explain anything. And he can explain it in an interesting way, making you care about stuff – such as bureaucratic enabling laws and public authorities – that you never thought you’d be interested in. He imbues this arcane field with as much excitement as is possible (which is obviously relative), and is careful and methodical in relating the complex interactions that gave Moses his power.

Finally, Caro is a great researcher. He conducted hundreds of interviews, including hard-to-get face-time with Moses himself. This was no small thing, especially in 1975, when this book was published. At that time, Moses was still alive, and his cronies, the Moses Men, were a tight-lipped group. Indeed, while The Power Broker is now a historical artifact, it was once as much an exposé as a traditional biography. It was Caro who helped strip away the Moses myth and show how much destruction he’d wrought. (I wasn’t alive to see New York in the 70s, after Moses strangled it with concrete and steel. Judging it solely based on the film The Warriors, it wasn’t a great place).

One of the few problems I had with The Power Broker is that Caro didn’t have enough room. He crammed all his research into this one-volume work, instead of giving the story space to breathe (as he’s doing with Lyndon Johnson).

As such, there’s a lot of scrimping of certain aspects of Moses’s life. For instance, the farther along you get, the less you hear about his family life, such as it was. (I, for one, would’ve enjoyed more elaboration on the string of mistresses Moses kept). More importantly, there’s no Jane Jacobs! Jacobs was an activist and author (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) who – Caro once said, outside this book – was the only person to ever beat Moses, when she helped stop his Lower Manhattan Expressway. At one point, Caro had an entire chapter on Jacobs. Then, at the behest of the editor, this was removed. Now there’s not a single mention of Jacobs in 1,200 pages!

The other issue is the constant time shifting. Caro doesn’t follow a strictly chronological approach. Instead, his method is more theme-based. For example, Caro will devote an entire chapter to a single public works project, while excluding reference to all the other things going on at that time. This can be a good thing for the reader, as it adds these dramatic mini-narratives within the book’s overall arc. However, the result is that you might move forward several decades within a single chapter, only to be thrust back in time when a new chapter begins. The bottom line is that you need to pay close attention.

I spent much of The Power Broker loathing the petty brutishness of Robert Moses. Part of the reason I wanted the Jane Jacobs chapter reinstalled was because I wanted to see Moses get his butt kicked. That never happens in this book. Caro writes that Moses lost his power, but I don’t see it that way. Moses never got beat; he simply got old. And it’s a testament to Caro’s skills and fairness that by the end, as Moses saw his name start to fade, you actually feel a bit of sympathy for the guy.

Like all great builders, Moses strove for immortality. However, by the end of his own life, he must have realized that he’d written his name upon the sand. Most people today don’t know him, and I’m fine with that, because it would have pissed Moses off.

So just forget I ever mentioned him.

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.

I thought I had original thoughts about why this pulitzer prize winning book is overrated and then this journalist took them. In stripping Moses bare of his cocoon of power, Caro does become Moses to some degree. He subsumes all of his life to his project, and his project becomes kind of a slog for the reader. Attention to facts is important, but half of these could have been in the footnotes. Page after page after page of dollar amounts that are somewhat irrelevant for a modern reader due to inflation, page after page of names of members of the New York Democratic Party, the same old corrupt men over and over. And for what? He leaves out Jane Jacobs completely. He leaves out the voices of the African-Americans and Puerto Ricans though he eloquently describes their plight. He stretches his conclusions over 1100 small print pages when he could have made them in 500, or 600. It's a giant Moses parkway of a book, a traffic jam of names and dates interrupted every 10 pages or so with a brilliant phrase or observation. Caro is an insanely talented writer in addition to his obsessive attention to detail, but his style relies to a ridiculous extent on the emotional labor of others, whether its his wife, his editor, or his readers.

I still mean to read "Fear City" and now even more see the work of Phillips-Fein as starting right where Moses leaves off. I anticipate that she will value concision where Caro did not. However, I do disagree with her contention that "What is almost always missing is economic power on its own terms, or the ways that even Moses was ultimately subservient to commercial interests in the city." I believe that is the exact point of portraying his true fall as due to the massive power of the Rockefeller family rather than the work of community activists, and his exhaustive treatment of the connections between unions, banks, and political machines that pushed his disastrous form of development. Caro may not be an anarchist or socialist, but he gives plenty of ammunition for both groups to expose the ways that the intersection of capitalism and state power justifies the misery of huge swaths of people in the service of public works that will never make their lives better.

Every New Yorker should read this book and everyone who wants to be a writer should too. Caro is amazing and Robert Moses--holy cow. This book is fantastic. It's worth reading--even if it takes a while.