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brbur101 's review for:
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
by Robert A. Caro
5 stars for effort. Exhaustively researched by Caro. He deserves all of the accolades for this incredibly thorough body of work.
But holy shit is it exhausting to read. Unless you have a deep interest in civics and local government/municipalities, you will most likely struggle to finish this book. There’s no way around it, it’s a total slog. I mostly listened using audible, while driving to and from work. There were times where I completely zoned out from the audio for 5-10 mins, came back to the present moment, and felt I didn’t miss anything.
With that being said, there are flashes of brilliance when the human elements shine through in this book. The elements within us that involve power, corruption, greed, perseverance, and hubris really come through in this book; I just wish there were more of it. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of pages of minutia involving city and state government that I really could care less about. I wanted more about Moses the man. His motivations, and why he did what he did. We get some of that in The Power Broker. But not enough for a book running over 1,000 pages. I did feel the ending was especially poignant though, and the last sentence in particular has stayed with me because it so clearly shows what kind of person Moses was.
When I visit New York or drive on a parkway, I’ll think of this book and Robert Moses. It will probably help me through a few answers of Jeopardy! or come up five years from now at a cocktail party. Other than that, I can’t say I’ll think much about it.
But holy shit is it exhausting to read. Unless you have a deep interest in civics and local government/municipalities, you will most likely struggle to finish this book. There’s no way around it, it’s a total slog. I mostly listened using audible, while driving to and from work. There were times where I completely zoned out from the audio for 5-10 mins, came back to the present moment, and felt I didn’t miss anything.
With that being said, there are flashes of brilliance when the human elements shine through in this book. The elements within us that involve power, corruption, greed, perseverance, and hubris really come through in this book; I just wish there were more of it. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of pages of minutia involving city and state government that I really could care less about. I wanted more about Moses the man. His motivations, and why he did what he did. We get some of that in The Power Broker. But not enough for a book running over 1,000 pages. I did feel the ending was especially poignant though, and the last sentence in particular has stayed with me because it so clearly shows what kind of person Moses was.
When I visit New York or drive on a parkway, I’ll think of this book and Robert Moses. It will probably help me through a few answers of Jeopardy! or come up five years from now at a cocktail party. Other than that, I can’t say I’ll think much about it.