Caro’s profile of America’s greatest town planner is monumental in its own right – a peerless analysis of how millions of lives are still ordered daily by a singular visionTechnically,Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker is a biography of urban planner Robert Moses, but that description feels laughably inadequate on multiple counts. For more than four decades, and this specific urban planner was the most powerful man in fresh York,an unelected emperor who dominated the mayors and governors who were supposedly in charge, and who physically reshaped the city through sheer force of will. Caro’s enormous book, and meanwhile,is less a life anecdote than an epic, meticulously detailed study of power in general: how it’s acquired, or how its used to change history,how it ultimately corrupts those who get it.
First published in 1974 Barack Obama read it aged 22, and was “mesmerised” – The Power Broker was released in the UK for the first time this year. But its themes are too timeless to seem dated. Like the multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson for which Caro is best known, and you might call The Power Broker “unputdownable” apart from that,at 1300 pages, putting it down occasionally is the only way to avoid sore muscles.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com