The Power Broker

Seven years ago, when the Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs was released, the Hypercritical podcast with John Syracusa and Dan Benjamin released their two episodes #42 and #43 on the biography. During the discussions the subject of how great could it have been? came up and Syracusa replied by mentioning a biography of epic scope and detail. About how it was several years in the making. How it turned every stone and took every angle.

That recommendation hung in my head for years and years.

The Power Broker is massive, but so is the subject. You get under the skin of the nitty-gritty details of how -- and why -- neighborhoods are leveled and roads a built. You realize how construction cost is only one cost in the complicated calculation behind what leverage makes a construction project possible or not. You awe at how political and legal skill can construct what amounts to almost literal sovereign bodies of government.

Ultimately the narrative is about the struggle for power, the eventual rise for power, what use and application power can have and finally the rather hollow fall from power. If you like House of Cards then this is the real-life book version. At least to a degree.

A 1300 page tomb on highways and parks might not sound exhilarating, but you feel every mile of it. Not only are all angles told, but they are told humanely and with care. Several side characters have mini-biographies within the book. This book is as much about Robert Moses as it is about the people who's neighborhoods and homes were leveled. Careers destroyed. Lives and relationships broken. Fortunes expanded. The unfairness and arbitrariness of their treatment is hard-hitting and, honestly, not pleasant. Ultimately you are left questioning the motivations of those who aided Robert Moses; those who turned the blind eye to it.

Do the ends justify the means?