However, Caro's tremendous, artfully compiled detail, based on dozens of interviews and exhaustive source-hunting, ensure...
At the height of his power Robert Moses was emperor of nearly all New York State public works—bridges, highways, housing, parks, electrical power, the World's Fair and the United Nations—without ever holding elected office.
In his chairmanship of twelve agencies from 1924 to 1968, Moses spent at least 27 billion dollars with immense inefficiency, utter disregard for opponents and maximum reward for friendly banks, contractors and political allies. Caro richly documents his arrogance and vindictiveness, exemplified by his penchant for bulldozing unrelocated residents' homes. At the same time, Caro's fascination with Moses, a prerequisite for writing this 1296-page biography, produces a Last Hurrah undertone right up to Moses' old age: "forgotten to live out his years in bitterness and rage." Moses reached power in a decade when Mussolini's corporatism was praised by such venerable sources as the AFL and the New Republic; and along with his mammoth public spending and chronic lying, Moses replicated tire Fascists' disregard for legality and due process, in a drive for complete personal command. Caro tends to treat Moses' history too personally, without explaining that Moses' World War I civil service reform "idealism" and his later push for highways, conservation and public works expansion reflected general leitmotifs of those political periods. The book views Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 ouster of Moses as a clash of temperaments, for example, without asking whether the Governor's transportation and urban redevelopment reorganization schemes might not have required a new, equally ruthless but lower-profiled species of administrator.
However, Caro's tremendous, artfully compiled detail, based on dozens of interviews and exhaustive source-hunting, ensure that "The Power Broker" will be acclaimed as the definitive monument to Moses, as well as a key study of the web of political figures connected with, and against, Moses' career.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1974
ISBN: 0394480767
Page Count: 1352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1974
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
