The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Free

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One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping and mis- shaping of twentieth-century New York city and state and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York most powerful man of our time in New York, the One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping and mis-shaping of twentieth-century New York city and state and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today. In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors from La Guardia to Lindsay by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America and probably the world has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power and ruthlessness in wielding it equalled his own. Get A Copy. PaperbackVintage Books Editionpages. Published July 12th by Vintage Books first published September 16th More Details Original Title. Robert Moses. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Power Brokerplease sign up. Phenomenal book. Can anyone recommend a comparable work about the building of L. This is a thousand pages and weighs as much as a four layer carrot cake platter included and yet is not available as an ebook. It requires a table to lay the thing out to read? Marisa Bowe I tore my copy into 3 sections and carried only the one I was reading at the time. See all 9 questions about The Power Broker…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Sep 29, Jessica rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: everyone in the goddamn world especially New Yorkers. Shelves: here-is-new-yorkfavorites. 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 This is definitely the greatest book that I have ever read. I had a brief thrilling moment of maturity when I voted for the first time at age eighteen, but election returns in the years since in particular the presidential race dulled the sophisticated glamour of the ballot box, forcing me to admit that an ability to vote does not indicate the presence of intellectual maturity When I was a little kid, I felt that the adults around me had a thick, rich, complicated understanding of the way the world worked. They knew things — facts, history — and they understood processes and people and the way something like a bond measure or a public authority worked. Grownups had an infrastructure of information, truth, and insight that I lacked. But reading this book made me feel like a grownup because it helped me to understand the way the world works as I never had before. This book is about power. It is about politics. It is an explanation of how public works projects are built. It is about money: public money, private money, and the vast and nasty grey areas where they overlap. This book is about democracy, and the lack thereof. It is about social policy, and economics, and our government, and the press. It helped explain traffic in the park, and the projects in Brownsville, and a billion other mysteries of New York City life that I'd wondered about. The Power Broker is about ideals, talent, and institutional racism. It is about inequality. It is about genius. It is about hubris. It is the best goddamn book I have ever read in my entire life, hands down, seriously. Please do not think that it took me five months to read this book because it was dense or slow! This was a savoring, rather than a trudging, situation. Robert Caro is an incredibly engaging writer. One thing that happened to me early on from reading this was that I lost my taste for trashy celebrity gossip. It is infinitely more readable than Us magazine, and not much more difficult. Of course The Power Broker is many things, among them a biography. While any one portrait The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York New York power icons from The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Smith to Nelson Rockefeller is more than worth the price of admission, this book is primarily about Robert Moses. Caro understands and explains the relationship between individual personalities and systems. One of his main theses is that Moses achieved the unchecked and unparalleled levels of power he did because he figured out how to reshape or create systems around himself. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority would not have existed without Robert Moses, and Robert Moses would not have been what he was, or accomplished what he did, without the brilliance he had for shaping the very structure of government into conduits for his own purposes. To explain this, Caro needs to convey a profound understanding not only of how these systems worked, but of who this man was. He does so, and the result goes beyond Shakespearean: it is Epic. Robert Moses was an incredible genius. He was also an incredible asshole. Robert Moses was probably one of the biggest assholes who ever lived, or at least, who ever got free reign to redesign a major modern American city to his fancy. One of the innumerable triumphs of this book is that while it certainly does demonize Moses to a great extent, it doesn't seem to do so unjustifiably, and it never strips him of his humanity. I might not, though. My main problem with it was that it was too short. How real a prospect were these, and what did the public fight look like? I definitely recommend that anyone who reads this book do as I did, and divide it with an exacto knife into four duct-tape bound commuter volumes. View all 59 comments. Nov 30, Matt rated it it was amazing Shelves: historybiography. But the meadows and trees were not for them. 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 The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, explaining that they were reserved for township residents. 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. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York - Robert A. Caro - Google книги

For more than four decades, this particular urban planner was the most powerful man in New Yorkan unelected emperor who dominated the mayors and governors who were supposedly in charge, and who physically reshaped the city through sheer force of will. But its themes are too timeless to seem dated. Did he drag New York into the modern age, forcing through much-needed public works and eradicating intolerable slums, against opposition from corrupt politicians and landowners? But Robert soon found that ruthless pragmatism got more things done. Meanwhile, he brazenly cultivated a public image as a man of total integrity, far above the dirty compromises of politics. He soon occupied so many crucial government posts simultaneously that he held a trump card: if a mayor tried to restrain him in one area, he simply threatened to resign from all his jobs. He was too popular, and too essential, to be sacrificed; the mayors backed down. Masterfully, Caro shows how Moses transformed New York in ways both progressive and backward, benign and cruel. Then again, he so hated the idea of poor people lowering the tone at the seaside that he built bridges over his parkways with insufficient headroom for buses, so only cars could make the trip. Convinced that African Americans had a special dislike of cold water, Caro alleges, Moses kept temperatures in one Harlem pool deliberately low to keep them away. But Moses stubbornly refused to spend on subways, or to build roads a little wider, so train tracks could run down the middle. When The Power Broker was published, the city was on an accelerating slide toward epidemic levels of street crime, homicide, homelessness and crack addiction; Moses had built gorgeous parks, but you were crazy to visit them after dark. Without him, would New York be a The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, economically stagnant ruin, or a big version of Copenhagen? The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York perhaps it would be Houston : Moses may have forced through public projects in a high-handed manner, but at least they were public projects; far worse things happen, arguably, when private capital has free rein instead. You see how the fixed, physical facts of the city might have been otherwise, had different personalities prevailed. Facebook Twitter Pinterest. Topics Art and design books. New York reviews. Reuse this content. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? Most popular. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

Daily: 9 AM - 4 PM. Skip to main content. Search form Search. Advanced Search. By Robert A. Politics and Prose at Union Market. Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens—the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses—and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller. But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man— an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, playlands and beaches—and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of never sufficient highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the accumulation of power became an end in itself. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear—his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"—a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses—an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time—without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system. Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars—he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder. This is how he built and dominated New York—before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation by the press and his power by Nelson Rockefeller. But his work, and his will, had been done. No review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is nothing less than how present- day politics was born. Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age. With this fascinating and meticulous account Robert Caro has once again done America a great service. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, the historian and writer. Praise The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York "Surely the greatest book ever written about a city. A monumental work, a political biography and political history of the first magnitude. This is definitive biography, urban history, and investigative journalism. This is a study of the corruption which power exerts on those who wield it to set beside Tacitus and his emperors, Shakespeare and his kings. There has probably never been a better dissection of political power. From the first page. Not just a stunning portrait of perhaps the most influential builder in world history. Every politician should read it. A majestic, even Shakespearean, drama about the interplay of power and personality. Wade, The New York Times Book Review "The feverish hype that dominates the merchandising of arts and letters in America has so debased the language that, when a truly exceptional achievement comes along, there are no words left to praise it. Important, awesome, compelling--these no longer summon the full flourish of trumpets this book deserves. It is extraordinary on many levels and certain to endure. He is also an extraordinary writer. After reading page of his book The Power Broker, I gasped and read it again, then again. This, I thought, is how it should be done. One of the greatest nonfiction works ever written. Every MP, wonk and would-be wonk in Westminster has read [Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson], because they think it is the greatest insight into power ever written. They're nearly right: it's the second greatest after The Power Broker. Wagman, Cleveland Press "An extraordinary study of the workings of power, individually, institutionally, politically, and economically in our republic. The most unlikely subjects--banking, ward politics, construction, traffic management, state financing, insurance companies, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York unions, bridge building-- become alive and contemporary. It is cheap at the price and too short by half. A milestone in literary and publishing history. It's more than the story of a tragic figure or the exploration of the unknown politics of our time. It's an elegantly written and enthralling work of art. White "A stupendous achievement. Caro's style is gripping, indeed hypnotic, and he squeezes every ounce of drama from his remarkable story. Can a democracy combine visionary leadership with effective checks and balances to contain the misuse of power? No book illustrates this fundamental dilemma of democracy better than The Power Broker. Indeed, no student of government can regard his education as complete until he has read it. It is like one of the great Russian novels, overflowing with characters and incidents that all fit into a vast mosaic of plot and counterplot. Only this is no novel. This is a college education in power corruption. Louis Post-Dispatch. Membership Benefits. Gift cards can be used online or in-store. Popular Fiction. By Colson Whitehead. Availability: In Stock—Click for Locations. The Testaments: A Novel Paperback. By The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Atwood. By Ottessa Moshfegh. Published: Penguin Press - June 23rd, By Elliot Ackerman. By Ilana Masad. By Natalie Jenner. Published: St. Martin's Press - May The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Popular Nonfiction. Baker III Hardcover. By Peter BakerSusan Glasser. Published: Doubleday - September 29th, What Can I Do? By Jane Fonda. Published: Penguin Press - September 8th, By Vikram Mansharamani. By Anna GoldenbergAlta L. Price Translator. Published: New Vessel Press - June 9th, By George Packer. 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