The Power Broker, an acclaimed book that has been hailed as “one of the great works of American history” and “a landmark study of power in a democracy,” tells the hidden story behind the shaping and misshaping of twentieth-century New York (city and state). Covering more than half a century, Robert Caro’s magisterial work reveals how one man — Robert Moses — served as head of numerous city agencies, where he remade New York City into his image. Caro’s book is a compelling portrait not just of this master builder but also of his times and the forces that affected him.
Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is a classic of urban history, the biography of one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in New York’s twentieth-century history: Robert Moses. But Caro’s book is not so much a biography as it examines power and its uses. What emerges most powerfully in this highly original work is how much power shapes and molds those who wield it–and how ultimately powerless they are to control it. One of the finest books ever written about American politics and power, The Power Broker stands as an enduring testament to one man’s legacy–and a gripping lesson for our troubled times.
The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses, is the definitive history of urban America, a book so rich with revelations that when it was first published in 1974, its revelations rocked New York City to its foundations. Now, with the publication of this new edition incorporating the fascinating new material uncovered during Caro’s recent research, we can see how accurate that assessment is today.”The book almost single-handedly transformed how historians look at cities, politics, and biographies.” –New York Reviews of Books.
About The Power Broker Book
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 misshaping) 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 of 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 into 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 conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars–the most excellent 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) equaled his own.
