We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.īut 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. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. 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. 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. One of the Modern Library’s hundred greatest books of the twentieth century. A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping of twentieth-century New York.
