Liveblogging The Power Broker, part 1
Jan. 3rd, 2026 05:52 pmWe're finally at the stage of 'Jack gives up on reading nonfiction using eyes' where I'm re-acquiring books that were already on my shelf as audiobooks. This works especially well for books that are intimidatingly long! Since October I've been listening to The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, and sending notes about it to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ambyr in increasing detail.
I went in knowing that my uncle living in New York hates Robert Moses, that Jane Jacobs, renowned urban planning person, also hated him, and that he got a lot of highways built and destroyed large numbers of houses in a process known as 'urban renewal' - and that was about all.
The first half of my liveblogging is under the cut. Overall impressions, though: this book is extremely entertaining and lucid. Caro is good at rhetoric. He aims to tell the story of Moses personally and of New York as a whole, and does both things well - though the two parts aren't evenly distributed. For the book's first chunk, Moses is the protagonist, doing some bad things and some good things, having some successes and some failures, and gradually securing his hold on power, while the book detours into the history of various aspects of New York - Long Island, Tammany Hall - to put what he's doing in context. Then, about halfway through, Robert Moses finishes becoming a villain out of Tolkien, effective in his scheming, remorseless in his desire to reshape the world, and never satisfied in the immensity of his power. At this point, the book's focus moves more completely behind some of the people whose lives he destroys along the way, as they try and fail to stop him. This part of the book was hard to listen to - not because it's less interesting or worse-handled, but it's just so sad. And then we return to Moses more closely for his downfall.
Lightly-edited liveblogging commences.
( Read more... )
ambyr in increasing detail. I went in knowing that my uncle living in New York hates Robert Moses, that Jane Jacobs, renowned urban planning person, also hated him, and that he got a lot of highways built and destroyed large numbers of houses in a process known as 'urban renewal' - and that was about all.
The first half of my liveblogging is under the cut. Overall impressions, though: this book is extremely entertaining and lucid. Caro is good at rhetoric. He aims to tell the story of Moses personally and of New York as a whole, and does both things well - though the two parts aren't evenly distributed. For the book's first chunk, Moses is the protagonist, doing some bad things and some good things, having some successes and some failures, and gradually securing his hold on power, while the book detours into the history of various aspects of New York - Long Island, Tammany Hall - to put what he's doing in context. Then, about halfway through, Robert Moses finishes becoming a villain out of Tolkien, effective in his scheming, remorseless in his desire to reshape the world, and never satisfied in the immensity of his power. At this point, the book's focus moves more completely behind some of the people whose lives he destroys along the way, as they try and fail to stop him. This part of the book was hard to listen to - not because it's less interesting or worse-handled, but it's just so sad. And then we return to Moses more closely for his downfall.
Lightly-edited liveblogging commences.
( Read more... )
