Robert Caro on 50 Years of 'The Power Broker'

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Robert Caro’s 1974 biography “The Power Broker” is a book befitting its subject, Robert Moses — the unelected parochial technocrat who used a series of appointed positions to entirely reshape New York City and its surrounding environment for generations to come. Like Moses, Caro’s book has exerted an enduring and outsize influence. This week, Caro tells host Gilbert Cruz how he accounts for its enduring legacy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gilbert Cruz editor the New York Times Book Review and this is the book review
0:08.1	podcast.
0:09.9	This week I'm joined by a modern master of biography and history writing Mr Robert Caro.
0:16.0	He has written four volumes of The Years of Linden Johnson, a multi-book work on the life of the 36
0:22.4	President of the United States.
0:24.6	Volume 3, Master of the Senate, won the Pulitzer Prize.
0:28.4	Volume 4, Passage of Power, appeared on our recent list of the best books of the 21st century so far.
0:35.0	Before all that, however, in September 1974, 50 years ago, he published the Power Broker,
0:42.0	a book about the man who built modern New York City, Robert Moses.
0:47.0	Robert Moses built beaches and parkways.
0:50.0	He built bridges and expressways.
0:52.0	He built Lincoln Center and Shea Stadium and the United Nations headquarters.
0:56.7	Robert Caro built the Power Broker, a book both Titanic and length and scope, and one that continues to be read and discussed and obsessed over to this very day.
1:11.0	Robert Carroll, welcome back to the book review podcast.
1:14.3	Pleasure to be here.
1:16.0	Now, Mr Carroll, and I'm going to call you Bob because we just discuss what I should call you.
1:20.9	I don't want to necessarily go through a summary of the book
1:23.1	I want to go through a summary of who Robert Moses is I think if people are
1:26.5	listening to this interview they've read it or maybe they've seen the documentary
1:30.2	turn every page from a few years ago about you and Bob Gottlie.
1:34.0	Hopefully I'm not going to ask you to say things about Robert Moses that you've been saying for the past half century.
1:39.0	But 50 years is significant. I would argue that non-fiction biography history, a lot of it doesn't
	...

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