Robert Caro’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of New York
City’s greatest urban planner finally arrives in the UK. Educated at
Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, Robert Moses began his life in public
service as an idealist – but he soon realised that power was the only
path to efficacy, and deviousness the best safeguard of power.
The rest of Moses’ working life is a story of brilliance, arrogance, and
subterfuge. In a career spanning half the 20th century, Moses built
27 billion dollars’ worth of public works in New York: parks, roads,
hospitals, playgrounds, bridges, and schools. With ruthless and creative vision, he transformed the landscapes and the lives of millions.
Caro’s book is a masterful interweaving of the individual and the political; a biography of 20th-century New York as much as of
Robert Moses, its phenomenal detail is endlessly engrossing despite
the weight of its thousand pages.
