Word: caro
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...POWER BROKER by ROBERT A. CARO 1,246 pages. Knopf...
...Caro's treatment of Moses is a fine blend of appalled contempt for the man himself and grudging respect for his enormous achievement. The only way to build things on the scale Robert Moses wanted to build them was by wielding political power on a commensurate scale. But after years in office, Moses became, predictably, less and less concerned with building and more and more concerned with power. Governors came and governors went, mayors were able to govern New York City or they were not, but Robert Moses remained in control of the fiefdom he had built...
...Caro's book comes close to being a history of New York from the first decades of the century to the present. If Caro tends to see Robert Moses behind every brick, well, he was there almost always. But Caro's attack on the Moses myths is nearly as overblown, at least in style, as the myths themselves. He writes breathlessly, and sometimes The Power Broker sounds more like a harangue against a political opponent than a well-researched biography...
...CARO sometimes writes as if he were lecturing his readers about very difficult subjects, and leads them through the not-very-complicated reasons why New York banks were anxious for Moses's Port Authority bonds (they were tax-exempt, very safe, and paid higher interest than similar bonds) as if he were explaining the Federal Reserve System to a group of ten year olds. But The Power Broker is one of the most interesting books to appear recently on the tired subject of New York. Caro concludes that a democratically-biased system of checks and balances is unable to build...
...Caro's indictment of Moses is devastating and, for the moment, unanswerable. But all this cannot obscure the fact that New York State enjoys some 45 per cent of the total acreage of state parks in all 50 states--because, in part, Moses was powermad. Now that Moses is gone, and we don't have to worry about him running an expressway through our living-rooms, we can safely acknowledge that some of his projects are of a magnitude of imagination and execution that requires extraordinary quantities of visionary imagination as well as raw power...