The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Robert Caro is fascinated by power. He has given his life to exploring how it is gained and kept. And in Robert Moses, the subject of this epic book, power looks like the ugly idol it can be. It delivers at first, but then it enslaves.
But let us not think that power is in itself bad. Caro himself has incredible powers. The sheer amount of work—hours and hours of work, years of work, years of at first unremunerated work—that Caro put into this and his LBJ projects required power. This work has rightly exalted Caro (and his wife and research assistant and, for this his first book, bankroller, Ina)—because those years were spent for the good of others instead of for the amassing of power in itself. Indeed, Robert Caro is now a living legend. Robert Moses, because his quest for power became...