On Finishing the Power Broker

After a full year, I finally finished reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. It’s a seriously incredible exploration of the life, achievements, and controversies of Robert Moses – New York City’s “Master Builder” – who singlehandedly reshaped the face of New York City, and the lives of its millions of inhabitants, for generations.

The scope of this book is as incredible. Caro conducted 522 interviews, and took around seven years to write 700,000 words across 1,162 pages (down from one million words in first draft).

Reading this – as well as Caro’s noted LBJ series – makes me wonder the extent to which methods such as Moses’s or Johnson’s might fly today, in a time of greater transparency and information sharing.