The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Hardcover – Deckle Edge, July 12, 1974

Exceptional book

This was on my reading list for many years and I was surprised to see it pop up on the bookshelves of TV news personalities in Zoom interviews during the pandemic. Then came the 2022 documentary “Turn Every Page” about Caro’s writing process and Robert Gottlieb’s editing. I was sold and decided to take the plunge.First, there’s a lot of detail on every page. It tells you the details of not just Moses as a “Power Broker,” but the ins and outs of civil planning, laws, government funding, etc. Some of these details might be difficult to understand, but it’s filled with excellent information about how Moses took advantage of all these things and exploited them in every way possible.“The Power Broker” is said to be a portrait of the man who built New York, but it’s more than that. It’s about the shaping of modern day New York, the financial institutions, erosion of Tammany Hall, the importance of infrastructure and how civil planning has been used for good and bad.“The Power Broker” is unprecedented and extremely detailed because all the previous attempts to profile Moses were written with his involvement and control of the narrative. Caro wrote an objective biography with some access to Moses and some of the people who worked for him or whose careers he destroyed. This was Caro’s opportunity to tell the real story and even though Moses has been vindicated in some ways, not all the means are justified.It’s a long read (1100+ pages excluding the reference notes and index), but it’s worth every page. It took me 3 months because I examined many subjects, figures, associated stories, etc.

I felt compelled to add the last part of the title because I was drawn to this boom with the reviews consistently saying this book was the best biography of all time. While it certainly lands in the top 10. It falls behind Truman as far as biographies of similar ranks but I would place it ahead of Chernow's Hamilton. I guess take that for what it's worth

Absolutely amazing story of an incredible man.

When Shea Stadium is demolished later this year, it will mark another diminishment of the legacy of Robert Moses, the man who built the stadium along with so many of the parks, highways, and buildings that made New York City the city that never sleeps.But the first and most devastating blow came 34 years ago, when Robert A. Caro wrote this book."As long as you're on the side of the parks, you're on the side of angels," Moses would often say. "You can't lose."Others did lose, though, Long Island farmers whose lands Moses confiscated for state highways, middle-class neighborhoods in the way of his superhighways, and the city's poor who were at best nuisances to the elitist Moses during his decades in power. Combining his management of city affairs with his longer-standing role as state Parks Commission president, Moses was a Nietzschean nightmare of will-to-power pragmatism run amok. As Caro explains it, power was a path to glory, and glory a path to power, in a way that made Moses deaf to all other considerations, both idealistic and practical.Eventually it made him corrupt, though not in the way it's more commonly understood. "Some men aren't satisfied unless they have caviar," said John A. Coleman, a broker of considerable power himself. "Moses would have been happy with a ham sandwich - and power."Caro's book is an engaging landmark account of Moses' path, full of vibrant characters like Al Smith and Nelson Rockefeller with whom Moses dealt and clashed. It presents a sense of New York City as an almost living thing, an infrastructure challenge not only because of its developed landscape but because of its unique demands of demographics and geography - only one of its five boroughs, the Bronx, is on the American mainland. Moses' solutions, however, were often worse than the problems.Caro spends a long time on Moses' foibles but never really explains how he amassed such a collection of structural triumphs. Shea Stadium, for example, is only touched upon as background to the failure of Moses' 1964-65 World's Fair. His state work, especially upstate, is almost entirely ignored. In damning Moses, Caro leans on some well-researched critical facts as well as some points about Moses' resistance to mass transit that doesn't allow for the fact Moses was not the only believer in the power of the automobile. The book reads like quicksilver at points, yet drags in others, especially when Caro is beating home the point of how little Moses cared about other people.I'm glad I read "Power Broker", but I can't ever see myself trying to read it in toto again. It's exhaustive, single-minded, and giant in scope - much like the man it's about.

The thing that really stands out to me on this book is how beautifully it is written. The words jump off the page.

It is not easy to read, not only because of the contents but the fonts are so small that you often have to strain your eyes. But it’s worth it!

I'm going to return the book because it's missing the first pages.

Excelente libro, y calidad de portada y hojas. Muy recomendable.

In a peculiar fashion, this magnum opus of a nonfiction is never in any manner less than a fiction. What Mr. Caro does to the characters and events in this book can ever be surpassed in the quality of prose by none but a countable few. The book speaks on the various manifestations of the character of a power wielding human being which have a profound impact on the lives of millions of lesser endowed people in a political setup. The personality of Robert Moses as portrayed in the book will leave the reader with mixed feelings of love and hate for the man who reshaped the way the greatest city in the world looks at present while at the same time trampling the ordinary man under his Commissionership’s powerful juggernaut. Moses grossly violated human rights of thousands of poor people of New York for his great projects but could those monumental works ever have been done without such unstoppable force? Could the works of such magnitude be done with the same kind of administrative Fiat in the modern times? The reader may be left to answer those questions for himself.On 27th October, 2015, Robert A. Caro made a rare appearance onstage at London in a talk moderated by William Hague. In his talk Mr. Caro talked about all the dynamics of power working in civilised democratic societies. Mr. William Hague was very much correct in suggesting the publishers to publish the original work on Robert Moses comprising about 1 mn 50 k words. Readers of the works of Mr. Caro must join together their voices for publication of the original and uncut version of "The Power Broker" as a collector's edition. At least now, the publishers can rest assured of the commercial success of the original unabridged book. It's my earnest request. Mr. Hague may certainly chose to lead our voices.