Tag Archives: robert caro

My 2024 in Books

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I read more (23/20) in 2024 than I expected to, but not as much as I did in 2023 (37/20)!

I liked seeing my “2024 in the books” page on BookWyrm and I can add some more personal notes on it. Of course, I still recommend you switch away from goodreads to a platform built for you and join bookwyrm.

While my 2023 was mostly occupied by 2 fantastic authors, my 2024 was dominated by 1 author.

Heck, one book.

That I still haven’t finished.

I set a goal to read “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro and listen along to the 99 Percent Invisible Power Broker series of podcasts as I read it. This went off the rails a bit because the book is… enormous. It’s a tome. I rarely have time to read at home, so I sneak it when I’m out and about and waiting on something. That means ebooks work for me. I love a paper book so much, but I basically keep a paper book next to a special chair that I can cozy up in and read. But that’s not how I get to spend a lot of my hours. There was no ebook of the Power Broker for sale1. I got a pirated one and started reading.

The pirated copy was of a dismal quality. It was confusing where the chapter were. I plowed far ahead to make sure I didn’t listen to the podcast too early. It was a mess. Finally a friend from my work book club loaned me his copy and it made a huge difference. But I was way off the pace.

I fell off more when I went to Iceland and London this summer, because I couldn’t bring the huge tome with me.

Despite all that, I join the chorus of converts who crow about Caro’s careful cooking of mad Moses’s credibility. It’s sparkles with perfect sentences, paragraphs that build and build a tower and then throw you off the top. Over on BookWyrm I’ve commented on this more and quoted more bits than any other book.

Before we learn about the absolutely vile tricks Moses pulls to steal land from some robber barons, Caro makes sure to set up how truly vile they are as well. Caro makes no secret of Robert’s racism, but amid a long story about the “West Side Improvement” he takes us farther and farther to point out how beautiful the parks are, how custom the details are to blend in. Then he sticks the knife in.

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves. The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

— The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro (Page 560)

I’m going to finish this book in 2025. It is already a favorite, one I can’t stop talking about.

I wanted to write more about the books I read in 2024, and I did pretty well. I reviewed on BookWyrm more than on my blog. I’ll redouble my efforts. No one is paying me to do this, no one expects it of me, so I can do as much or as little as I want. Like exercise, I like it when I’ve done it, though doing it is a hassle that requires discipline. (Speaking of exercise, I came close, but did not achieve my fitness goal for 2024. I’ll nail it in 2025. I’m going to do 2 one arm pull ups on each arm.)

Here are the books that I wrote about:

  • The full Scholomance Series by Naomi Novik (A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves)
  • The book that was most loathed and complained about in my book club, The Tangled Lands. They are wrong, this is great, but very sad.
  • How Big Things Get Done – the most valuable for work. (Though a single story about “The Orange Juice Test” is a close contender.
  • How Infrastructure Works – which let me think about what’s hidden and what’s thought about vs what’s not considered. More philosophy and meaning than I expected!
  • The darkest book. Killers of the Flower Moon. Coffin dirt and the devil’s eyes.
  • I really enjoyed The Dispossessed – it pairs well with the Power Broker in a conversation.
  • I didn’t think Fables was that great. I didn’t think it was great when it first came out, but since I got the whole thing as a gift I read it. It’s… ok.
  • Several People are Typing made me actually laugh out loud. It was a great weird semi-work-horror-comedy.
  • Unity is a fast fun wild rollercoaster that combines fave topics like distributed consciousness and nanogoo. Highly recommended.
  • Tender is the Flesh was absolutely brutal. From the first pages it is very uncomfortable and it gets worse the farther it goes.

In 2025 I’ll shoot for another 20 books and hopefully get more in again! Setting low bars lets me keep winning!

  1. It wasn’t until September 2024 that a proper digital edition got produced! ↩︎

The Power Broker Read-along 2

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Continuing to read The Power Broker, but since I talked with my Dad about it, he started reading along as well. It’s been fascinating because of the parallels and because he is a challenging commentary on the text from a contemporary. We’ve been emailing and calling about the book and it’s been a ton of fun.

Things I’ve noticed – our modern discussions of privilege throw a different light on Robert Moses. To me, his family’s wealth is a glaring light on every paragraph I read. The man is brilliant, sure. But he also has the ability to just work on whatever he wants. He doesn’t have to take a job for the cash. He can work for causes that don’t pay because he has no pressure to do otherwise. He can become the best bill drafter in Albany for Governor Al Smith because he has no pressure to feed his family. He can jaunt off to grab a boat and explore the coastline because what… is he going to get fired? He’s an unpaid advisor.

Also – the description of the families trying to make it out of New York City and out to the countryside is the absolute nightmare of any father. This part of the book is gold.

My dad got very interested in some controversies and really got me thinking. My dad is 86, the age of Robert Moses when The Power Broker was published. He has the perspective of someone who was able to enjoy the work of Moses before the book, to see it through the eyes of someone who directly benefited from the beaches and parks that were built. First, he challenged the story of the racist parkway bridges. We went back and forth investigating it a bit. Caro quotes from a direct source interview, but its from someone who died before the book was published. His source says that Moses told him to lower the height of the bridges. And the bridges do seem lower than the previous bridge heights – but there were planned bus routes to Jones beach! You can see the bus schedules!

My dad also bristled at Caro’s description of Franklin Roosevelt as a “featherduster” and someone who went back on his word. Franklin Roosevelt is a hero of my father’s and he has treasured letters from Eleanor Roosevelt in his collections. I think it’s possible that a younger Franklin may have had to play some hard politics to get where he wanted to be. It’s also possible that a younger FDR may have been immature and the older FDR was tempered by the challenges he faced.

Another great contribution from dad was the response by Robert Moses to The Power Broker’s publication, along with Robert Caro’s reply. It seems to me like such a lot of wind to blow so few leaves, but maybe that is my modern sensibilities clashing with someone educated at the turn of the century.

For the podcast, Jamelle Bouie didn’t bring as much to the table as I had hoped, partially since he hadn’t read The Power Broker. Much of the episode was taken up with recounting what we had read. Please! I read it! I want you to give me more insights! There was a great insight from Jamelle about how the “professionalization” of government had removed some incentives to treat people well, to trade favors, to get small things done for actual people. There was corruption, to be sure, but there was also someone to talk to if you needed to get a change done. That papers over a lot of misery and blood I think, but it was more human than a bureaucracy.

a swarm of butterflies against a blue sky

The Power Broker Read-along 1

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In addition to my work book club (we’re reading How Big Things Get Done by Brent Flyvberg) I found out that one of my favorite podcasts “99% Invisible” is doing a read-along of the massive Robert Caro book “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”. It’s a biggie – so they are going to work through it over the course of 2024, with one episode a month covering a 12th of the book. This sounds totally achievable.

I’ve just finished the first part – Robert’s beginnings, his family, his progressive paternalistic origins and the brutal education in power that he goes through. This guy seems to be a massive intellect, a fantastically energetic powerhouse of change, an aristocratic snide jerk who looked down on all of us (my ancestors are particularly some of the people his family organized to keep from embarassing them), and possibly one of the most destructive people who doesn’t get credit for it. Once you listen to Butterflies, the Memory Palace’s story of how Thomas Midgely was inadvertently a destructive monster who murdered so many of us a fraction at a time, you begin to think about the other secret monsters in the world – killing us in tiny slices. They removed so many parts of so many peoples lives, bringing the day of their death closer than needed.

Listening to the first episode of 99PI’s Power Broker read-along was great – Robert Caro is the guest, you begin to grasp that Robert Moses did the same, but in the middle of people’s lives and he did it for aesthetic reasons. He wanted to prevent us from having trains and public transportation. He had the choice and he chose to do things that made so many people in my region sit idling in cars, pumping exhaust out and increasing their blood pressure. It reminds me of the part in Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett where a demon takes credit for a the design of a UK motorway as a force of massive incremental evil. I was hooked in the first 20 pages, but I feel like we are in masterful hands by now. I was eager to not get too far ahead of the podcast – but now I can get through the next chunk. It is definitely not too soon to get started and join in – I am eager to chat with folks about it.