The Power Broker Book Review

When Robert Moses, the subject of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, fought for his vision of parks, bridges, and expressways in Long Island and New York City, the single most important tool at his disposal was his power. When his dreams met the resistance of his opposition, the outcome of each conflict reflected the balance of power on each side. When Moses prevailed, it was because of power. Though it is also a biography of Moses and a study of 20th century urban planning and civil engineering, this book shines as a treatise on power: how it is acquired, used, and lost. Moses has long faded into the annals of history; public policy has evolved during the intervening half century since the publication year of 1974; but power, through its invisible, grasping tendrils, operates in today's world through the same mechanisms as in the Moses era. Weaving his research throughout his narrative, Caro has crafted a cynical and compelling journey through the halls of power, inviting the reader to reevaluate their world through a new and insightful perspective — to see through the stark lens of power. One particularly depressing theme of the book is that power always prevails. Truth, logic, and consequences be damned, the outcome is decided by what the powerful want and how much power they control. Power alone can explain why Moses' Northern State Parkway, unlike its Southern sibling, meandered tortuously across Long Island — to mollify the robber barons whose estates lay in the right of way — why his Henry Hudson Bridge sliced through the primordial heart of Inwood Hill Park — because, among other funding-related reasons, that particular route was eligible for federal subsidies — and why the East Tremont section of his Cross-Bronx Expressway veered to the north, blighting what had been a successful neighborhood, which remains to date one of the most impoverished in NYC — to preserve a transport depot in which key city politicians held ownership interests at the time. The tenants