At 600,000 words, it’s a real doorstopper.

Throughout the book, he devotes enormous amounts of time to explaining the systems - city government, parks, the New Deal, public authorities, urban renewal – that Moses worked with and held power over.Īll this detail makes the book extremely long.

This level of context – memorably brought to life using storytelling techniques from the world of fiction – is a hallmark of Caro’s work. He starts even before Moses’ birth, with a history of his grandparents and his mother. The book has received praise from many modern politicians, with a testimonial from Barack Obama featuring prominently on the back cover, and even had a brief stint during the pandemic as a Zoom background status symbol.Īs you would expect from a biography, it follows Robert Moses’ life chronologically, but from the very start, author Robert Caro’s attention to detail is clear. From the intricacies of civil service reform to the various promises and threats that can be (and were!) used to pass legislation, the book is a deep dive into the way politics works in the real world, and how Robert Moses used and abused its systems during his four decades in power. While this is true, the word ‘biography’ fails to do justice to the book’s sheer scale. The Power Broker is usually described as a biography of Robert Moses, New York public official. But even though The Power Broker came out almost 50 years ago, it remains unmissable for anyone interested in the inner workings of politics and corruption. This is a book about a man you’ve never heard of a city you don’t live in and politics that happened before you were born. More The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New YorkĪn exploration of real-world politics through the life of one deeply flawed man

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