The Power Broker

How power actually works, studied at the level of a single unelected man who reshaped a city. Robert Moses never won an election, yet he bent New York to his will for forty years, and Caro spent seven years finding out exactly how. The book is enormous because the lesson is: that the real machinery of power often runs below the visible offices, in the appointments and authorities no voter controls. A masterwork on the gap between democracy's forms and its facts.

The reporter who turned the study of political power into a life's work of a scale almost no one attempts. The Power Broker showed how Robert Moses reshaped a city without ever facing an election. The Years of Lyndon Johnson, four volumes and counting, is the deepest account ever written of how American power is gathered and used. Caro's method is exhaustion in the honorable sense: he finds out everything, and tells it.