The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

May 21, 2008 Jessica rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone in the goddamn world (especially New Yorkers)

Shelves: here-is-new-york, favorites

This is definitely the greatest book that I have ever read.

Midway through adolescence, I began wondering a bit which life event would finally make me feel like an adult. Of course I had the usual teenaged hypotheses, and acted accordingly to test some of them out. Getting drunk? Having sex? Driving a car? Going to college? None of these things did make me feel grownup; in many instances, their effect was the opposite. I had a brief thrilling moment of maturity when I voted for the first time at...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Hadrian rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography-memoir, american, history, nonfiction, politics-and-foreign-policy, urban-studies, society-and-culture, favorites, epic

Robert Caro's The Power Broker is the Citizen Kane of books. This is not only because of how often both are almost universally praised, not only because they have both become a cipher for what you want to refer to something truly Great in that form of media, not only because they are both narrative biographical epics which can also discuss the intimate details of the personal lives of their subjects, but also because they both the stories of engineers of human society on a grand scale.

Robert Mo...more

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Aug 26, 2012 Jay Oza rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 power it will go no where. 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,...more

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Aug 12, 2007 Mishka rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: autobiosnbios, essentials

i have never been afraid of hyperbole so here goes: i bow down before the greatness of this book. i can separate my 10 years living in new york as pre-caro and post-caro. every aspect of my life in new york, the subway, the roads, parks, politics (current and historical), every detail of mishka brown's highly anticipated treatise 'what i would do if i was in charge - the new york city edition' (yes, i talk about myself in the third person) is influenced by this book...this book is so vast, so fa...more

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Oct 03, 2007 Jerry Raviol rated it 3 of 5 stars

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 driv...more

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Sep 24, 2007 Michael W. rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: New Yorkers

Shelves: biography-read

Robert Caro's exhaustive, yet compelling biography of Robert Moses should be required reading for anyone in or considering public service. Moses held more power than Mayors and Governors in New York for over 40 years, without ever having to be elected. Though he did once mount a disastrous run for Governor of New York.
Many of the passages are amazing and even humorous, specifically the relationship and petty moves and counter-moves between Moses and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in the 1930s. The boo...more

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Jan 28, 2009 Mjackman rated it 4 of 5 stars

Bob Caro has a readable way of drawing you into Moses' life story, and shows Moses' fascinating transformation from reformer to ramp-builder. I was unaware that progressives actually *embraced* the automobile and big plans to clear "slums" back in the "good old days." I guess lots of reformers came up saying, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." (An apt epitaph for Moses.)

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Aug 30, 2007 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, history

Long before Robert Caro, a former Newsday reporter, began his seemingly endless series of Lyndon Johnson biographies (last volume is in production now), he wrote this absolutely brilliant portrait of Robert Moses. I knew very little about the man before reading it. Afterwards, I understood not only the deep extent of his political power in New York, but the fact that he was responsible for many of the city's major parks, bridges and the infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway. A man driven by ego and th...more

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Feb 28, 2012 Harlan rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an astonishing book. For at least three reasons. First, Robert Caro is a master of exhaustively-researched biographies, and this book is remarkable in the comprehensiveness of his portrait of Robert Moses. From details of his youth and college years, to a blow-by-blow description of his fall from power as an old man, the writing is detailed, opinionated, and razor sharp. Second, the life of Moses is astonishing in itself. The book gives a portrait of how idealism can be quickly turned to...more

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Apr 26, 2013 Jeremy rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book, along with Fukuyama's very different book on the origins of Political Order, are the two best reads of the last five years in terms of non-fiction. I'm late to this book, of course, as it came out in the mid 1970s. I've read all of Caro's other books, and loved them, and yet somehow had never been drawn to this. I saw it on a colleague's bookshelf, borrowed it...and became absolutely enchanted.

It's the story of Robert Moses, from youthful, brilliant idealist reformer, who wanted to fi...more This book, along with Fukuyama's very different book on the origins of Political Order, are the two best reads of the last five years in terms of non-fiction. I'm late to this book, of course, as it came out in the mid 1970s. I've read all of Caro's other books, and loved them, and yet somehow had never been drawn to this. I saw it on a colleague's bookshelf, borrowed it...and became absolutely enchanted.

It's the story of Robert Moses, from youthful, brilliant idealist reformer, who wanted to fight corruption, entrenched interests, and invigorate government through democratic means, to the most powerful man in New York city and state, for decades, who became a destroyer of people while violating every principle of good government, including honesty, transparency, democracy, division of power, and so on. Moses' genius is so well captured in the early chapters, and the goodness of his aims, that it takes hundreds of pages before you fully grasp what a monster he has become just a few years into his long career. Caro's gift is that he can show you WHY this happened, what were the key turning points. Little details, such as the man's increasing deafness, play a role in his inability to adapt to the needs of the 50s. Long into the 1960s, he's still building highways that fail to address what is wrong with the city's transportation network, because his mindset was shaped by the 1920s, and became immoveable. Early on, he surrounded himself with the best talent. As he evolved, talent was replaced by sycophancy.
And it shows why government must always be limited. Moses' power was such that he could trample entire neighborhoods, and express his disdain for entire races and ethnicities, through governmental power. Caro is a master of the vivid detail which reveals Moses, for good and ill. The tiny details in the design of his first great state park showed his creativity, his bold vision. Then, later, when he built parks all over New York City...except Harlem...Caro shows the racism that drove the man to ignore black needs when, forced finally to build a park near blacks, Moses makes it almost inaccessible to foot traffic, and then, in the coup de grace, decorates the top of the park's fences with...iron monkeys. Every park built as part of that project had a fence detail that described the nearby neighborhood. That was the only one with a monkey.
As with his LBJ books, Caro is asking deep questions about the nature of power in a democracy. Must government employ ugly means if anything is to be done at all? Must those who wish to wield power get their hands dirty, inevitably? How dirty?
The book also shows how rare courage is in the political world. Everyone knew by 1960 that Moses was a terrible bully who destroyed people's careers for objecting once to his projects. He used McCarthyite tactics and kept secret files on every important person in the state. He used his network of media contacts to release negative stories, true or false, against anyone who crossed him. While personally honest in terms of never directly skimming money, his projects were laden with corrupt practices that fed the Democratic political machine. And he was horribly corrupt in exploiting his contractors and his govt employees for lavish parties and favors. This was known at least in part to most of the political insiders--and almost none had the courage to take him on. Moses even destroyed his own brother, first financially, and then reputationally, until he ended in abject poverty and obscurity, when he had, as a young man, been known for his brilliance and ability.
If you do read the book, when you finish--google Moses' response to the book, which makes for good reading as well when you finish this. Suffice to say--nothing that Moses says makes you doubt one word, not one comma, in this extraordinary achievement in biography and political science. It is as good a read as Royko's marvelous Boss, the portrait of Mayor Daley, but far far far more deep in its analysis.(less)

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Feb 12, 2013 Snidely rated it 1 of 5 stars

I found it ironic that the tale of such an obviously arrogant and self-righteous man (Moses) should be written by such another obviously arrogant and self-righteous man (Caro).

Most would agree that Moses was a despicable character. That he was able to hoodwink so many for so long, and misappropriate so many hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds for so long, left me scratching my head. That's the story.

Caro's bombastic and repetitive style became very tiresome. I got to the point of th...more

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Jan 08, 2013 William rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

A mammoth of a book following the life and career of Robert Moses, a mastermind of parks, politics, and power. Moses is portrayed as arrogant workaholic with glittering genius and a peculiar idealism. He was devoted to public service but he was particular about it. Moses' notion of the public was highly abstracted from the real thing. Once he gains a foothold on true power he took steps to cut himself off from criticism, or any other sort of communication from the public he ostensibly served.

Onc...more A mammoth of a book following the life and career of Robert Moses, a mastermind of parks, politics, and power. Moses is portrayed as arrogant workaholic with glittering genius and a peculiar idealism. He was devoted to public service but he was particular about it. Moses' notion of the public was highly abstracted from the real thing. Once he gains a foothold on true power he took steps to cut himself off from criticism, or any other sort of communication from the public he ostensibly served.

Once in power Robert Moses created public authorities for himself to secure his position from the whims of the public and political change. Through these he's able to reshape the state of New York to his own design. Moses' designs include greenspaces and highways but is exclusive of public transportation and neighborhoods where people live. Moses briefly gets into the business of building Title 1 housing projects and the results are, at first, merely horrific but then they get worse.

Caro tallies the opportunity costs of these jammed up highways and bridges for which neighborhoods were leveled; of the great parks where the poor and non-white are excluded; of the people forced out of their old, run-down apartments and crammed into where-ever an opportunistic landlord is willing crowd desperate people, while a builder pays for his graft and bribery by constructing a housing project with the very cheapest and shoddiest of materials and methods and pockets the difference in what the city paid him for it. The results are staggering.

Caro describes the ways and means of Moses' power which makes this book education in power politics in addition to biography. The tricks Moses used to get his way from the very agencies which are supposed to protect public interest are startling. One back cover blurb goes: "A study of municipal power that will change the way any reader of the book hereafter peruses his newspaper." And for me at least, it's true. I hear and read and see news differently now. In each news story now I perceive a move in a great game. The practices of Moses have only been further refined in this day.

There are lots of sad stories in this book but one of the saddest must be that of Robert Moses. Robert Moses surrounded himself with sycophants and sharks, so of course he couldn't truly trust these people, however loyal they were. His greed and vainglory created circumstances in which he had to occupy his entire genius and vision to micromanaging the construction of his parks, roads, and bridges, not to mention all the work of securing money and power to fund and protect them. In this portrait Caro tempts me to feel sorry for him.(less)

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Jul 18, 2012 Emily rated it 3 of 5 stars

Since I loved Robert Caro's LBJ books so much, I thought I'd tackle the biography that started it all. I just couldn't get into this book. The problem was not Caro's writing, which is as rich and detailed as ever, but rather the subject matter. Robert Moses seems to have been an arrogant, charmless man who viewed the "public" in public works as an amorphous blob, disdaining--bulldozing--the individual people for whom he built all those parks, highways, and housing projects. The story of how he d...more

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Feb 14, 2011 Jeremy rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 biograph...more

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Feb 13, 2011 Steven Peterson rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 peo...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Michael Connolly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed, biography

Bob Caro is one hell of a writer. His research is obsessively detailed, and his writing is dazzling. The subject of this, his first book, is a public official, Robert Moses, who pushed New York City to build tons of infrastructure. The book is mainly about how he acquired and used political power. Many have criticized Moses for destroying old neighborhoods, but for me, the main issue is what share of the credit does Moses deserve for all the roads, tunnels and bridges built during his watch. He...more

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Dec 20, 2010 Tom M rated it 4 of 5 stars

A must read if you're interested in the 20th century history of New York City.

Robert Moses was the symbol of the insane amount of power and clout not only in New York City/Long Island, but New York State between the 1920s and the 1970s. If you've driven on a highway, expressway or parkway or sat in a park in New York City or Long Island, chances are it's there because of Robert Moses. Because of the loopholes in law which he knew, there was very little in the way of bureaucracy involved in his p...more

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Apr 12, 2012 Aaron Arnold rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, economics, history, politics, favorites, read-in-2010

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 th...more 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.(less)

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Aug 11, 2012 William Ramsay rated it 5 of 5 stars

For years now I have been telling people that I think Robert Caro's bio of Lyndon Johnson is the finest biography I've ever read. Now I must add a second contender for that title. The Power Broker is an outstanding study of a man's life. In many ways the characaters of the two men Caro has chosen to writer about are similar. Both were great leaders with deep flaws. Robert Moses was a man with a brilliant mind, a commanding presence, an all engulfing charm, and flaws that destroyed his place as o...more

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Apr 08, 2012 Jose-rodrigo Hernandez rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: new york history buffs, urban planners, politicians

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 24, 2012 Scott Smith rated it 5 of 5 stars

Read this in college, and to this day, I consider it to be one of the best books I've ever read. Great narrative flow, and abounding in interesting detail - a study in the practical aspects and acquisition of political power, without ever running for office. One of those rare books in which there are footnotes with narrative, that are must-reads - you need two bookmarks for this book - one for the main text and another for the footnotes. I remember first seeing this tome as a NYS Assembly Intern...more

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Aug 13, 2012 Jan-Maat added it

Shelves: 20th-century, biographical, modern-history, politics-and-polemic, usa, business-management-pm

This is a book about power. And amongst other things parks.

For forty-four years Robert Moses through control of different institutions, often whose formal authorities he had designed and drafted into legislation, created a power base that enabled him to escape the constraints laid upon bureaucrats and elected officials and to stamp his vision upon the developing city of New York.

If the Bonfire of the Vanities is the shock book of 1980s New York then The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall o ...more This is a book about power. And amongst other things parks.

For forty-four years Robert Moses through control of different institutions, often whose formal authorities he had designed and drafted into legislation, created a power base that enabled him to escape the constraints laid upon bureaucrats and elected officials and to stamp his vision upon the developing city of New York.

If the Bonfire of the Vanities is the shock book of 1980s New York then The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York tells the story of some of the factors that made the city that way.

Robert Moses was energetic, ambitious, hugely gifted but deeply arrogant, a bully and prejudiced. Initially enthusiastic for public service reform to break the power of Tammany Hall over New York politics and government and from a prosperous German-Jewish background involved in charitable works he became a master of manipulation, building support through public relations, disbursing jobs and patronage, keeping files on public figures and carrying out revenge with a thoroughness that makes burying a rival in the foundations of a building seem amateur and unimaginative.

Mayors and governors were successively seduced by his ability to complete massive public works before the following election but also successively learnt that his power base made him virtually invulnerable.

Moses' vision was of sweeping roads, bridges and parks. His work reshaped the city. Unfortunately his vision was of a New York that would be designed to be middle class and white. Roads and bridges in some cases were designed to be suitable for cars only. Attempts to provide mass transit links either to the parks or the World's Fair or even to allow for the possibility of others providing such links in the future were explicitly blocked or prevented if necessary by starting to build. His ideal for Long Island in particular was striking - to be a suburban area of low density housing with no industry.

The outcome of all this was a city congested with car traffic (which in turn necessitated the early adoption of multi-storey car parks). Neighbourhoods with all their existing networks of employment and local commerce were broken up and either degenerated into slums or were replaced with higher cost housing. The massive building projects swallowed up city, state and federal funds to the extent that there was not even the money available for the maintenance of the new parks let alone for non-Moses approved transport development. However since a key source of Moses' power was the money raised from toll bridges it was a situation that at least worked to the advantage on one man.

The giant swimming pools that Moses had built in New York show the workings of his mind to both good and ill. On the one hand he and his team developed new systems of underwater lighting and the system of disinfecting foot baths that are ubiquitous in public swimming pools today. At the same time because he believed that black people prefer to swim in warm water he had the temperatures of certain pools kept low and to discourage non-whites from swimming would only employ white staff (the same policies were also used at his beach developments and parks). At the same time as deliberately excluding parts of the population from amenities that he declared open for public use the financial drain on the city meant that spending on schools and hospitals was inadequate.

As benefits a man educated at Yale and Oxford he didn't offer patronage in the obvious Tammany Hall method of jobs with inflated salaries with the city but in a subtle way. Cut price concessions, advance information about road building plans, consultancy jobs, lavish entertainments, long-term relationships with banks - effectively creating a bank run by a leading member of the New York Democratic party Thomas Shanahan by depositing large sums of money with him at zero percent interest and obliging contractors he worked with to bank with Shanahan. Cronies had businesses created for them to manage the relocation of people dispossessed by building works, in term sub-businesses were created to drain out money for example by buying the fixed appliances in apartments for a nominal sum and leasing them back to the main company for sums which were not nominal. The main company itself was funded by the city to manage the relocation process, while dispossessed residents were largely left to fend for themselves.

Essentially Robert Moses became an Augustus and created step by step an Empire for himself. The legislation that he had drafted protected him, almost totally, from political interference. Toll incomes and increasing car traffic allowed him to raise enormous sums on the money markets. Massive building works provided masses of patronage to disburse. Association with public parks won him widespread support and the mistaken impression that he had the public's interests at heart and was opposed to the vested interests, whose interest was entirely vested in Moses until he was finally deposed. (An arrogant man, the one time he stood for election he managed to lose the support of the press by insulting them at his first press conference and managed to speak against the particular local concerns of voters where ever he was on the campaign trail).

This is a book about the realities of power. It is full of politicking, intrigues, machinations, deals, law making, the importance of effective law drafting, the exploitation of the naive, dealings with politicians and interest groups alike. Also power over the environment, marshes drained, rivers bridged, moved and channelled, beaches created, land created. It is virtually a history of New York in the middle of the 20th century as seen through the work of one man. It is 1.7 kilos of fascinating, audacious and breath-taking undertakings few of which were ever tainted with legality as Moses himself liked to say. (less)

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Sep 01, 2010 Todd Smalley rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2010, non-fiction, biography

this book was recommended by a business school professor and sat on my mental bookshelf for a dozen years. I should not have waited. One of the cover blurbs uses the word "magisterial" about this book and it is so appropriate I can now hardly think of another word to describe it; it's simply one of the best (if not the best) non-fiction books I've ever read. Most important, Caro's compelling writing keeps you interested and motivated through this huuuge ((1,100+ pages) book. He helps you care ab...more

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Mar 20, 2012 Chris Gager rated it 5 of 5 stars

My next book. I've read about Moses in The New Yorker and may have even read some of this in that magazine but if I did it was in the 70's when a portion of this book was serialized therein. Only time to read the introduction last night but that was pretty compelling by itself. Here we go...
Day one... Pretty darned good reading so far. It helps to have a subject as fascinating as Moses of course. Brilliant, driven, racist, elitist, anti-democrat, narcissist with a scary PhD thesis on civil servi...more My next book. I've read about Moses in The New Yorker and may have even read some of this in that magazine but if I did it was in the 70's when a portion of this book was serialized therein. Only time to read the introduction last night but that was pretty compelling by itself. Here we go...
Day one... Pretty darned good reading so far. It helps to have a subject as fascinating as Moses of course. Brilliant, driven, racist, elitist, anti-democrat, narcissist with a scary PhD thesis on civil service reform sets out to reform New York City. So far he's only experienced impatience and frustration. It's going to be interesting to see how he get's things going his way. When I attended Yale(briefly) 55 years later the number of undergrads had tripled. That's one way of keeping those "legacies" and opening up enrollment to others. Day two... I just lost what I'd been writing so now I'll have to write it again. A thousand pages to go and if the first 20% is any indication it'll be pretty damned fascinating even though we begin to shake our head at the relentless "evil-doing" and "evil-being" of the book's subject. It's not that Moses didn't accomplish an astounding amount of change in his career, it's just that he had to be such a manipulative, monomaniacal, dishonest and self-absorbed a-hole to do it. The author clearly puts him in contrast to RM's friend, mentor and protector Al Smith, whose career and character Caro greatly admires. Also amazing is that it's only the late 20's and Moses has accomplished much and there's still 40+ more years(extending into my own early adulthood) of his career ahead!
Day three/four... A thousand pages to go and it's still gripping as more famous political characters come and go: FDR, a Moses hater but sometimes an ally uses and helps RM while Governor. Now he's President. Al Smith is in retirement but his friendship with RM is always a plus. Jimmy Walker, a useless Tammany hack, has left the country. Now Fiorello La Guardia, the anti-corruption crusading "Little Flower" has become Mayor instead of Moses. And RM takes it all more or less in stride and increases his power and accomplishments. This time in NYC itself. The early thirties...
And on it goes with never a dull moment... The highlight of last night's reading was the battle between FDR and Moses with Ickes and LaGuardia in the middle. The Pres trying in vain for revenge against RM. Pretty funny really. The outcome solidified Moses' position as untouchable even after his disastrous run for governor. Not the kind of personality to have an elected-type political career. Nowadays he might be better coached and protected from the media. But he was so extreme even that might not work. So now it's on to more building and more devious and/or manipulations and power plays. You Go Bob!...
But one more thing until tomorrow: To me it seems that the left-right schism in this country is still basically the same. On the right we have a lot white achievers and inheritors(mostly male and protestant) with money who want to keep it and on the left we have a lot of women and "minorities" and "progressives" like Al Smith who have a more "let's have everyone share the good life" approach. The battle over political power and control comes down to what happens to all that money. That's one of the underlying issues I'm seeing in NY state politics in Moses' time that continues today. Those righties are pretty tenacious about holding onto "their" money and associated priveleges. I do see a big difference in the fading of liberalism in the Republican party from then to now.
And on... Just past the halfway point and done with the "family" chapter. So much love there... NOT! I'm pretty much convinced now that RM was a textbook narcissist just this shy of having official NPD. RC's description of his informal disowning of his family past is stunning and telling. He just can't seem to help himself. No reason to bury Mom and Dad and Sis in particular but he does it anyway. As for his brother, who was about as nuts as RM(not as canny though), he seemed to have shifted his own guilt for ill-treating him onto the brother himself. Very weird and compulsive... The guy's just nuts. Relentlessly self-absorbed and now that he's in middle age(1940's)he seems to be focused exclusively on being a powerful big-shot. The rest of the book may be interesting but it won't be fun. At the end he's finally defeated but he'd done more than enough damage already. We'll see how it goes.
One more day at the salt mines... Actually it's still pretty interesting as Moses suffers a big defeat at the hands of FDR but of course he makes all his enemies "pay" for it and winds up with even more power after the war. La Guardia thought he was able to control Moses but others differ, including RC. And then FLG died and Moses was in even greater control over NYC motor vehicle ingress and egress. I expect now to read how he obstructed the development of badly needed rapid transit so he could keep the toll revenues for motor vehicles. No matter the cost in terms of traffic tie ups, neighborhood destruction and pollution. I'm hoping to finish this weekend so I won't have to renew from the library but it'll take some serious reading the next two nights to do it.
Almost done after the weekend and more and more skimming... The battles of East Tremont and the Tavern parking lot and the "people" are finally getting to see the real Moses. It's about time! One of the chief non-RM villains of the story are the newspapers of NYC, particularly the Times. It took most of them FOREVER to get around to aggresssively investigating RM's doings. Mayors: O'Dwyer showed some spunk but he was mob connected and wound up in Mexico. Impelleteri(sp?) was a Quayle if Bush Sr. had croaked in office. Useless... RM was really the Mayor during Impy's term. Wagner was a sniveling wisp in the political wind. Moses sins were many: bullying and hurting poor people too weak to defend themselves; failure to understand that his bridge and highway building were having a dead-end effect and were causing sprawl on his beloved Long Island; opposition to urban/ suburban Rapid Transit(is there still no RT service to LaGuardia or Kennedy?); rampant deceit of public officials; financial shenanigans for the gross profit of his allies and subordinates; neighborhood destruction. And on and on. And yet, there are those "revisionists" today who long for the Autocrat, the Big Man "who gets things done". Even a well-regarded liberal like Eliot Spitzer said... oh... wait a minute... never mind. The end-game is nigh. I feel bad about the skipping. Whenever I encountered a paragraph full of dollar signs and numbers I kept on moving. One paragraph from this morning covered more than two pages! I got an e-mail notice from the library that the book is due tomorrow and I'll be able to bring it back after today/tonight. Two solid weeks of reading and 1,000 pages were dropped pre-publication!
And now finished(with more skimming)... not much left to say. The reformers and tree-squeezers finally cut him up a bit and the newspapers started to investigate his Title I doings(mostly not having much to do with him directly). Then an ineffectual Lindsay at least got the ball rolling and the Rockefeller brothers and the World's Fair fiasco finished him off. He was done in by the same nasty tactics he'd been employing for years. At the end one detects a note of sympathy from the author for his almost-human subject, a truly nasty human being whose record of accomplishment is astonishing even while the quality or rightness of much of it is open to fundamental question(s). My own conclusion is that he must have been deeply lonely, not only in his lack of connection to others but in his lack of introspection and understanding of himself. Beware of narcissists seeking power, fame and riches(not to mention blood, destruction and pain... that's Ted Bundy territory)).(less)

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Oct 31, 2012 Motasem rated it 5 of 5 stars

I just realized I hadn't rated this book before. I read this a few years ago and I still consider it the best biography I have ever read - by far. It's extremely long so I would recommend skimming through the first 100-200 pages about his childhood and college years as they aren't too relevant beyond grasping his idealistic beliefs at the start of his career and the influence of his mother.

This book is incredibly eye opening about the frailty of man and the inner workings of city and state poli...more

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Sep 16, 2012 Stephen Matlock rated it 4 of 5 stars

A very, very good biography of a very complex, flawed, and powerful man. Robert Moses shaped the city of New York like no other person in history. He stamped the city with strong lines of transportation, shifting and destroying neighborhoods, and more crisply dividing the city into the haves and have-nots. But without him we would not have the extensive parks and beaches of the South Shore, the many parks scattered around the boroughs and the state, and the complex and extensive parkways, expres...more

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Apr 28, 2013 David Glad rated it 5 of 5 stars

While I rate the book a 5/5, I would rate the man a generous 4/5. Interesting that for the audiobook adaptation that they did not include the remaining handful of years of his life after it was first published in 1975, even if for an already 68 hour audiobook perhaps that would be breaking the elastic.

This really is an intriguing book for anyone who lives in/near Westchester county and New York City, as most major highways/bridges (Throgs Neck, Triborough, Verrazano Narrows, etc) Robert Moses ha...more While I rate the book a 5/5, I would rate the man a generous 4/5. Interesting that for the audiobook adaptation that they did not include the remaining handful of years of his life after it was first published in 1975, even if for an already 68 hour audiobook perhaps that would be breaking the elastic.

This really is an intriguing book for anyone who lives in/near Westchester county and New York City, as most major highways/bridges (Throgs Neck, Triborough, Verrazano Narrows, etc) Robert Moses had some involvement in and seems to have been bitten for life with America's infatuation with the automobile, which is why he really let subways/trains in the city decay which helped to overcrowd his highways and bridges, often as soon as they opened. (Might say had audiobooks been as abundant back then as now, especially this one, you probably would have had more than enough time to listen to this on said commute to the city.) He was somewhat immune to those consequences as he had a chauffeured vehicle courtesy of the taxpayer so that he could always work when moving about, while apparently just about never driving. (Also played into how he really had a more idealistic view of how people would look at travels as scenic versus just a commute at increasingly faster speeds.)

He really had a reputation for getting results and bulldozing his agenda through, which politicians loved to have trophies for during their regime, and unions loved all the "shovel ready projects" it meant for their constituents. The media (especially Arthur Sulzberger's NYTimes) helped to in the first 30 years to bolster his image while silencing/vilifying his critics as either being rich (despite the law being on their side)/against the people, shortsighted, or similar name-calling. Other favorite tactic was to use speed and stealth to demolish or begin construction of something before it could be heard by a judge, which even unions (in another incident) could not fight non-union labor used if a facility had already been built and opened to the public with the "good luck telling people they can't use it, tearing it down, just so you can rebuilt it." (Common sense prevailed there.)

As is clear from the book, Moses was also quite a narcissist and control freak but was good at holding on to power from 1924 until the 1960s when he faced governor Nelson Rockefeller, versus most types in government who are probably just greedy and care not so much about being remembered. Unlike people he steered contracts and power toward (and those he punished and more or less kept out of the loop, including his own engineer brother), he himself did not appear to amass a fortune (even as people figured he must be getting rich from outside consulting fees from other places) and often suggested throughout the book he was strapped for cash. (I would imagine one way of looking at the power he parlayed would be to consider it like an annuity to guarantee steady stream along with the various perks like the chauffeur that meant he himself did not need to come up with the money.. just a hunch that appears accurate.) The book seems to catch when the media became more critical of him, describing it as a sea change when reporters no longer feared for their jobs if they criticized him and were infants or young children when Moses took on some wealthy elites and opened Jones Beach to the public and could only see the slum projects that Moses was responsible for via the cronies/developers he signed lucrative contracts with. (As hinted above, really accelerated after NYTime's Arthur Sulzberger fell ill and so he no longer exerted creative control over NYC's most famous rag.) Combined with the 1964's World's Fair where all the business dealings he made were visible to the media/public and how he took a hostile attitude toward media questions which really helped buckle his reputation. (Another memorable line of how nothing unites the media quite like attacking them.) His peak power probably was from between 1935-1955 when not even FDR could have him removed from office and, as book indicates, his power effectively was greater than governors and NYC mayors. So once his power loss began to snowball (out-policked), it seems he was quite broken and I would imagine how the book chronicled his remaining years it would probably follow a similar theme to those last two or so years his mentioned.

Target audience for this book includes urban planners, anyone interested in the history of the Tri-state area with some curiosity by having traveled on many of those roads/bridges, and anyone who enjoys a really "complete" biography. As far as the audiobook's pace goes, it really stayed interesting enough that I could move or less listen to it while driving, while at the gym, and (typically stick to Will Durant here) on the treadmill too.(less)

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Aug 22, 2011 Rudolf Reading rated it 5 of 5 stars

I mentioned that I was reading this book to several people, and all of them asked me who Robert Moses was. Maybe no one will ever know who he really was, but this book can explain to you (in exhaustive detail) how he totally reshaped New York (city and state) during the 1920s-1960s. It will leave you with a sense of awe for the circumstances that transpired to give one man so much power over the infrastructural future of what was arguably the Twentieth Century's most important city. Parts of the...more

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Mar 13, 2012 Akiva rated it 5 of 5 stars

I don't have enough superlatives for this book. I read it over about three months just after moving to New York and it's packed with interesting city history. But ultimately it's about the rise and fall of Robert Moses and about the nature of political power. In certain ways, I felt, despite the incredible detail, Moses remained a cypher. You get the sense that even as he was lying and manipulating he felt like he was doing the right thing for the city. It was hard to get a picture of what was r...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Mike Russo rated it 4 of 5 stars

Robert Caro writes his prose in this one like the Pixies played rock: loud/quiet/loud. Turn to any page, and the pattern's there -- long paragraphs with detail and description, lulling you with their slow progression, interrupted by terse interjections, paragraphs two lines or maybe three: "The World's Fair gave Robert Moses a billion dollars to spend on power, and he got his money's worth." "And Moses on the defensive was a more attractive sight than Moses on the attack."

Occasionally the formu...more Robert Caro writes his prose in this one like the Pixies played rock: loud/quiet/loud. Turn to any page, and the pattern's there -- long paragraphs with detail and description, lulling you with their slow progression, interrupted by terse interjections, paragraphs two lines or maybe three: "The World's Fair gave Robert Moses a billion dollars to spend on power, and he got his money's worth." "And Moses on the defensive was a more attractive sight than Moses on the attack."

Occasionally the formula flubs -- "There was a ceremonial to even the smallest lunches" does not an entire paragraph justify -- but for the most part it works. The short paragraphs don't do much substantively, but they jolt you out of your reverie and make you pay attention to the bigger picture, slotting the massive accumulation of detail in these 1200 pages into something coherent, a story whose beginnings you won't have utterly forgotten by the time you get to the end, stuffed with irrelevant detail and shaggy-dog stories.

And that's the fundamental issue Caro's grappling with in the book -- he's got a story and a subject worthy of an epic, and the space to do so, but telling that story in the manner it deserves is incredibly challenging. It spans half a century, there are hundreds of characters and dozens of key events, and while there are a few that can do yeoman's duty in the synecdoche department, it would be entirely unconvincing to cherry-pick five or even ten central incidents to run set-piece chapters on and then call it a day. Half a thousand interviews went into the book, and at least a dozen untapped archives, to say nothing of the public-domain material consulted.

Wrestling this sprawl into some kind of order must have been intimidating, to say the least. And it's a problem that can't be solved structurally. Caro does a good job with the arrangement of his material, sticking mostly to a chronological presentation but straying to cover individual topics or projects from beginning to end when it's justified. He knows which players deserve their own smaller (or even extended) biographies, when to go on a multi-page digression to sketch an institution or a neighborhood.

But even given his skill in this area, there are flaws and omissions. The young Moses never really comes together, for example, an unstable hybrid of the mature power-broker and the young idealist who seems more literary creation than breathing human (Caro's sketch of "RM" in his prime and decline is ably done, however -- less surprising, given that Caro actually knew the man in the flesh). A significant part of Moses' power came from his creation of a cadre of aides and assistants, but with the exception of two or three, none ever makes much impression, and the organizational arrangements that created this network go unexplored. The various dams and electrical power projects he worked on were larger than anything else he built, but they get only a bare few mentions. And his personal life is almost entirely unplumbed, a significant failing given that the sparse glimmers we do get show a personality in significant tension with the portrait painted by the remainder of the book.

For his LBJ project, Caro would move to a multi-volume format, giving him more space to address some of these omissions. But in many respects that just multiplies the problem, requiring an even larger field of material to be integrated, compounding the chronological and structural difficulties. You can be ever more cunning about the arrangement of chapters and the inclusion of outside context; you can set out still more sweeping theses in order to provide a spine for what you think you're saying; but that only takes you so far -- page by page, you need to knit together the heap of detail into a comprehensive statement. Thus: spinning out the evidence then ramming it forward, spinning then ramming, on and on. Loud/quiet/loud, for the month it takes to read the book. It's a hell of a solution, and while if you're not already interested in New York and politics, you probably shouldn't try to read the book cover to cover, seeing how Caro pulls it off is certainly worth the price of admission and a quick skim.(less)

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