Book Description
One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes,
The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.
In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.
Customer Reviews:
The Best Book on New York City History!.......2007-10-02
As a native New Yorker I must say that this is the absolute best book depicting New York History I have ever read! Robert Moses was an amazing man who was very driven. The book gives some good insight into what made him the person he was and how Moses used to stay up all night reading books on every subject.
Moses had a hand in building just about everything that is New York. Unfortunately, he didn't do enough to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn!
More praise.......2007-09-08
My praise has to pale beside the mountain of kudos this book has received. The best book ever about power in America, the best book about the recent history of New York City, the best book about city planning.
Has conclusively shut the door on Robert Moses's reputation.......2007-08-08
I submit that it is impossible to finish "The Power Broker" without really viscerally despising Robert Moses. Partly out of a desire to leave no hole in his argument unfilled, and partly because he has trouble using one word when forty-five words will do, the book is just really, really long -- nearly 1,200 pages. I wanted to get angry at Caro for doing this; every time I considered getting angry at him, though, the next sentence would be some devastating quote from one of Moses' victims. The book could still stand some editing, but it's certainly the quickest, most engrossing 1,200-page read I've ever had.
It's far more than just a biography of Moses. It's a study of how power actually works -- how, specifically, dictators amass power, and how even ostensibly democratic systems can evade public scrutiny. For at least 30 years, according to Caro, Moses was utterly beyond democratic control. Anyone who wanted to get anything done in New York City needed Moses' money, and needed the engineering expertise that he monopolized. Anyone from the City's government who wanted to talk with the federal highway or public-housing authorities had to talk to Moses, who would relay (his version of) their words to the feds. No one could fire him without bringing down an endless public outcry -- an outcry encouraged and protected by the media, which Moses expertly manipulated into printing only what he wanted said and only the statistics that his office generated. Money and media were in his pocket; with those, he was invincible. A purely accidental slipup after 40 years in power led to a crack in the godlike image that the media had sculpted for him. That crack led the media to question one small corner of his power. Having surrounded himself by yes-men, Moses flew in a rage against any such questioning. But you don't pick a fight with the media. (The phrase one always quotes here is something like "Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.") That rage led to still more questioning, which led to still more rages, and by the time it was through his media armor was gone. Down fell the rest of his protection.
That, in the tiniest conceivable nutshell, is the story of Moses' power and its end. The Power Broker is an in-depth study of the processes that made all of this possible. The argument is watertight, as far as I can tell.
My big lingering question from Caro's book is whether any amount of legal tinkering could possibly have saved democracy from Moses. The people with the money will probably always own the political process in this country, whether they buy the politicians outright or do it in more stealthy ways. Much of The Power Broker explains the "honest graft" that powered the Moses machine: payoffs to lawyers hidden as fees, payoffs to insurance companies hidden as premiums, payoffs to banks in the form of interest-free loans, and payoffs to unions in the form of contract favoritism. When Moses "pushed a button," everyone on his side -- which is to say, the lawyers, and insurance companies, and banks, and unions -- would call anyone whom Moses wanted them to call and state in no uncertain terms that the recipient's political career would end unless he did Moses' bidding. No politician could withstand this kind of constant pressure. Moses had to engineer some remarkably clever legislation and get it pushed through without anyone noticing the details, so if anything he's a worst-case example . . . but that's just the point: you want to look at how the system (in this case representative democracy) works when something fails.
Apart from Moses-hatred, two big themes come out of the book. First, I will probably never read a newspaper the same way again. If we believe Caro, the media's coverage of anything related to Moses bore no relation to reality -- both because Moses wined them and dined them, and because they seem just incapable of reporting political backstories. And all the people who actually wield the power are far too clever to pull the lever themselves. The real power in New York, says Caro, is in places like the Chase Manhattan Bank, but the press never bothers to report from there. And the press is much more attuned to clear-cut scandal -- actual bribes, say -- than it is to honest graft. For 30 years, no one had the slightest clue what Moses was doing, even when what he was doing involved condeming the homes of tens of thousands of poor New Yorkers.
The Power Broker's other big theme is that the private automobile is an absolute disaster for American cities. It doesn't even make mathematical sense to build roads to the exclusion of public transit when you're trying to address traffic congestion: train tracks can accommodate an order of magnitude more passengers than can highways. And train tracks encourage higher-density development, by encouraging people to walk to their trains. That higher-density development means people can own fewer cars. Conversely, if lots of people own cars, the whole pattern of development centers on cars -- which is where strip malls and highway ugliness come from.
That second point illustrates the silliness of one common line of American thought. When an ugly patch of road forms that's lined with nothing but strip malls and McDonald's, we're inclined to say, "It must have happened because people wanted it to." But what "people want" is defined by the choices available to them. If someone lives in most American suburbs, he can't "choose" to walk to work. That choice is not available to him. He can't choose to walk to a movie theatre. He is forced, in fact, to "choose" to own a car. He then chooses, like tens of thousands of his fellow-Americans, to sit in the same traffic jam on the same highway. This isn't choice: this is path dependence, enforced by the roads that we've built. Had the government chosen to invest in subways and high-speed rail, the set of choices and costs would be different. But it doesn't even make sense to talk about a choice that's unencumbered by prior decisions or by institutions: the institutions define the set of available choices, and then those choices force future choices of institutions.
The big trouble with a public work like a bridge or a highway is that if society decides in the future that it wants to pursue another path -- say, subways -- that option is pretty decisively foreclosed. Caro illustrates this point with Long Island: it would have been cheap to have bought a 20-foot right of way for high-speed rail while condemning land for highways on the Island. Once that highway went down, though, the value of the land immediately shot up. It shot up even more when houses starting popping up there. Nowadays, even getting started on laying down track for a high-speed rail would involve tens of millions -- perhaps hundreds of millions -- of dollars in condemnation fees alone. Our earlier choices, in a very direct way, made later choices difficult if not impossible.
So it's hard, I think, to escape The Power Broker without really and truly despising the automobile. It's been a disaster for American cities, a disaster for America's rural areas, and of course a disaster for American foreign policy. Robert Moses may have done more than any one man to unite the evils of the automobile with the evils of undemocratic public planning.
Look on my (public) works, ye mighty ..........2007-05-26
I have to disagree with what some of the other reviewers who said this book mainly will be enjoyed by people from New York and intersted in city planning.
Robert Moses died before I could even walk on two legs, and I've never spent more than three days in New York in my entire life. But this book fascinated me from page one to page 1162, even as I pored over the pages-long passages detailing the complicated, subtly ingenious legalities of the bond contracts that were Moses' means of consolidating his power and slogged through sometimes-tedious descriptions of several of his major projects.
That's because Caro never loses sight of the thing behind every line and dot on the maps included in the book: the man, Robert Moses, himself, his cunning, his restlessness, his ego. I get the feeling that Moses may have himself been an embodiment of New York.
What gets me the most about this book is the bitter irony of Moses' tale -- really, the bitter irony of humanity. He starts out as the perfect idealist, an exceptional man who by sheer will and intellect will systematically pull the rug out from under the city's corrupt Tammany machine and the state's all-powerful, elite robber barons.
Toward the end of the book, he and his network of cronies have become the machine itself. When he finally falls from power, it is not a grassroots reform movement has toppled him, not even because the public and the press have turned against him after decades of blind support. Rather, he is quietly marginalized by the political and financial power of the Rockefeller family -- the heirs to the quintessential robber baron.
So by the end, decades after Moses first became the most powerful man in New York, nothing has changed and, it seems, nothing will ever change.
good book, read it.......2007-05-19
Mr Caro has written a meticulously researched peice of work. Architects and public officials will find plenty to gnaw on. I read over half the book and the last chapter and have a few later chapters to read but I think the flavor of the book has carried over.
Caro also wrote a trio of books on president Johnson. A story my father relayed to me about a party he was at where he had the opportunity to meet Lady Bird Johnson transpired as follows:
Lady Bird (in a thick southern drawl): What did your daddy do?
my dad: "he drove a cab in New York"
Lady Bird: "oh" and walked off
Plenty of stories like that to get through, and quite a few of them. I can only imagine how many people and how much reading this man had to do to get it all down into the book.
An important thing to remember is the time in which the book was written. Robert Moses was still alive at the time the book was published, and while plenty of praise is applied to the subject, it does come accross as a bit of a retribution. That said, the first time reader will pass through the book with the benefit of hindsight as New York didnt actually fall.
People interested in the dynamics of power, might do well to read the 48 laws of power by Robert Greeen, this is a portrait of a man who was no less than a force of nature, to appropriate the authors words. Moses laid the groundwork and provided a template for arterial highways accross the nation, as well as abroad. He was venerated, respected, and ultimately forced out of the work he spent his whole life materializing. The timing Moses had was uncanny becuase the introduction of the car and the car and highway lobby to remove public transit systems (Los Angeles, Chicago, etc...) to accomodate more cars suited his work well.
The classic work-a-holic, Moses worked tirelessly for many many years and what seems to this reader, stayed overcommited to his work so much so that he lost his perspective on the utility of what he started out trying to do.
When you take a plane to New York and land at JFK or LaGaurdia, you can see all the baseball diamonds, the vast sprawl of roads and highways, very much part of his work. There will never be another man like this but we can only take a thrilling read through the pages this book and glimpse the imagination of the man that waved his magic hand over the landscape. A true classic for anyone interested in civic government or public finance.
Product Description
Book Description
A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures.
In various roles in city and state government from 1930 to 1965, Robert Moses reshaped the fabric of the city. From Lincoln Center to the Triborough Bridge, the West Side Highway to the Cross Bronx Expressway, his public projects, reassessed in this book by notable urbanists, continue to exert a strong influence in the lives of New Yorkers. 250 illustrations.
About the Author
Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson teach at Columbia University. Among the other contributors are Martha Biondi, Robert Fishman, Owen D. Gutfreund, Marta Gutman, and Joel Schwartz.
Average customer rating:
- Fascinating study of a neglected religious painter
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Rouault in Perspective
Soo Yun Kang
Manufacturer: International Scholars Publishers
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Book Description
In his book, "Rouault in Perspective," Soo Yun Kang analyzes the works of Georges Rouault focusing on the effects that Rouault's religious and personal influences had upon his art. Due to Rouault's reticence about the meaning of his work and his disapproval of any attempts at explanation, previous scholars have failed to investigate the motives behind Rouault's genius. By contrast, Soo Yun Kang gives detailed attention to the numerous literary and philosophical figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, LŽon Bloy, and Jacques Maritain who influenced Rouault early in his life, and compares his work with the Christian artistic developments that took place in the 1920s as well as the politics of this era. "Rouault in Perspective" will allow a new insight into the artist and his art and will be of great value to those scholars interested in the interdisciplinary study of modern art and religion.
Customer Reviews:
Fascinating study of a neglected religious painter.......2000-02-17
As a historian of modern French culture, I always thought of Rouault as a rather odd and obscure figure, a religious man out of touch with the great modernist wave of art in his time. So when I read this book from the recommendation of a friend, I learned how wrong I was, how very relevant the works of Rouault are to the art and millieu of the period. Indeed he was one of the last great painters in whose works religious images and symbolism were predominant, but they were also very much modernist in character and many of them dealt directly with the social and political issues of the day. Soo Yun Kang, in her excellent series of essays, shows how Rouault as a person as well as a painter cannot be understood apart from the exciting period he lived in. She discusses, for instance, his relationship with the writer Huysmans, another religious and much neglected figure of the time, his involvement in various religious groups that were created in response to religious persecution of the era, and his use of traditional religious figures in modern context to make sometimes bitter commentary on the social and political problems. Kang is especially strong in her analysis of Jesus-as-a-clown-figure featured in some of Rouault's works, as well as of the judge paintings that comment on the justice system of the day. I recommed this book not only to people interested in art history and general history of the era, but also those who are concerned with expressing religious ideas in a modern setting. Again, an excellent book on a fascinating subject.
Book Description
Learn the secrets of fine art digital photography
Produce captivating and high-quality photographs easily and consistently with help from this invaluable guide, based on renowned photographer George DeWolfe’s most popular workshop. Inside, you will learn his “16-bit workflow” technique for mastering the craft of printing fine art photographs. You will also discover how to set up a successful “closed loop” environment--one in which you handle the entire photographic process yourself, sending nothing out for processing, manipulating, or development. Learning the qualities and techniques essential to creating a digital fine print with light, substance, and presence requires skill, experience, time, and vision. George DeWolfe’s Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop puts all of this expertise at your fingertips.
Customer Reviews:
Don't Waste Your Money.......2007-04-16
Firstly, I never write reviews, but I felt I had to for this one. Before I start I feel I should give my credentials. I have spent the last three years working as an assistant to a fine art printer working on traditional print projects for numerous big name photographers.
I bought this book after seeing that Mr Dewolfe teaches up at the Cone Workshops and after reading the good reviews on Amazon. That was a big mistake!! This is the reason why it is good to check books out in a store before you purchase.
The book is very weak. I had read "Real World Photoshop CS2" prior to this, so I had a very good benchmark. RWP CS2 is a truly excellent book on using photoshop. Dewolfe's book is poorly laid out, repetitious (very), contradictory and gives limited examples of valuable technique. I gained nothing from reading the book and bored quickly of his preachy style. Here is an example:
"The print has another dimension that I call presence. It has almost nothing to do with the technical side, but it is a matter of craft, that careful blend of aesthetic judgment and technical skill."
Now tell me if that is not a contradiction. Who edited this?
Another thing that bugged me is that the book feels like an advert for the line of Optipix plug-ins that he is associated with. He mentions them almost constantly (there is an advert on the last page if you missed the hundreds of references throughout the book).
Please, please, check this out in a bookstore before you make up your mind.
Comprehensive coverage of digital photography.......2007-03-09
Reviewed by Bruce Herman
Member of the Alaskan Apple User's Group
Anchorage, Alaska
George DeWolfe's Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop is a significant departure from any of the other digital darkroom books that I've read. It was easily the most challenging because it presented so many new ideas in such a short book (255 pp.). Most other books rely heavily on global corrections that emphasize curves whereas DeWolfe relies more on levels, even for color corrections. Other authors apply local corrections with masks, but DeWolfe prefers to brush on corrections using the History Brush. Digital Fine Print Workshop was one of the most rewarding books about print making because it made me think about my photographs in new ways. This book grew out of the workshop that DeWolfe teaches
DeWolfe begins with an overview of what constitutes a digital fine print. He defines the terms brightness, color, contrast and so on, and then introduces the workflow that will be the central focus of the book. He gives a series of examples that provide the reader with a basis of distinguishing the good from the not so good for each of the qualities just defined. DeWolfe says that he has had a lifetime of developing his own appreciation of these characteristics. So it's a bit of a leap for a reader to expect to come up to speed by viewing a handful of photographs reproduced in a book. Here DeWolfe might have referenced some photographs on the Internet to give the student a bit more background.
Two aspects of DeWolfe's overall approach that set his book apart from most other digital print making books are his emphasis on separating the mid-tones and his concern for the quality of light in the print. I think that understanding these factors alone are likely to lead to vastly improved prints.
The second part of the book, titled "The Workshop," constitutes the core of the book. It is in this section that DeWolfe explains and illustrates in detail his personal vision of achieving the fine art print from a digital photograph. The workshop focuses on digital photography beginning with bringing the digital files from the camera into the computer and ends with making the print. DeWolfe covers techniques for dealing with both RAW and jpeg image files as they come off the camera. He does not mention scanning, although one could reasonably follow the workflow for jpeg images. In any case, he works with 16 bit files, which he claims allows him to use levels in Photoshop without encountering the gaps that arise when working with 8 bit files. My personal experience was that 16 bit files did not entirely preclude gapping, but it was not as bad as it would be with 8 bit files.
DeWolfe performs his artistry in two phases. He begins with global changes and then fine tunes the resulting photograph with local changes. One of the tools that DeWolfe uses is a plugin called Optipix. Although he discusses some techniques that substitute for Optipix, I found that using Optipix often made a step more likely to work as described. I would recommend purchase of this plugin ($139) if you wish to carefully follow DeWolfe's workflow.
It was in the application of the local corrections that I found the most difficulty in DeWolfe's approach. DeWolfe uses the history brush to make local corrections to almost all parameters of the photograph. He eschews masks as tools for graphic artists, preferring the history brush because it forces an artist to commit in order to move forward. Each reader of this book will have to make his or her own assessment of this view.
The Fine Print Workshop concludes with a brief description of what is required for a digital darkroom, including setting the preferences in Photoshop. This part of the book seems to be an attempt to broaden the appeal of the book to beginning digital photographers. Considering the level of complexity in executing the steps in the workshop, this almost seems out of place. That portion that deals with the software and hardware will be out of date long before the techniques described in the workshop pass into irrelevance.
DeWolfe's book grew out of the week long workshop by the same name that he teaches. Reading the book is not likely to be as good as taking the workshop, but it's far, far better than just reading the generic Photoshop how-to book. Despite the fact that I don't necessarily agree with all aspects of DeWolfe's workflow, I highly recommend this book. Just be sure to leave a reasonable amount of time to absorb the material and give it a fair appraisal.
Is this Ansels Adam's 'The Print' for the modern era........2007-02-10
Before you waste one more sheet of printing paper, before you waste another minute with scanning and color management, before you waste another second with a bad workflow ... get this book. You will save the price of it in one week just in paper and ink alone. And maybe you will keep your sanity. This is bedtime reading, coffee shop reading, and "lightroom" reading. It is well written, well printed, and straightforward. I have followed George DeWolfe's suggested workflow to the letter, and it works! Don't buy another book until you have this one, and have read it two or three times.
Digital Workflow made easy.......2007-01-21
I have found this book to be really excellent in showing how to set up a workflow in PS. From input, maximising your Raw file before putting into PS, to non destructive methods of manipulation. Simple use of layers, all easily explained, Levels, Curves, Brushes, Sharpening, and much more. All this is done in a non complicated way and is easily understood.
A Master who knows his trade and can also teach simply. (not many of those around)
George DeWolfe's Digital Photography Fine Print Workshop.......2006-08-09
Excellent book. I have many books on digital photography and this book ranks very high. Excellent work flow recommendations and clearly written. This book will also be used as a reference text in a photography course I will be taking. I have almost completed reading the entire book and making notes.
Book Description
For over twenty years, readers have been entertained by the artistic stylings of William Nealy - boater, mountain biker, and cartoonist extraordinaire. With The Nealy Way of Knowledge, fans will be able to peruse over 60 never-before-seen cartoons in addition to the classics that portray the wit, insight, and humor Nealy readers have come to expect. Those unfamiliar with Nealy's cartoons will find strange but true camping stories, outdoor products you can't do without, hot air rubber chickens, skater moms, puns, an ode to duct tape, the roots of mountain biking, terrorizing squirrels, killer woodchucks, and spawning kayaks. If you don't fall on the floor laughing, you might want to check your pulse.
Books:
- The Process of Creating Life: The Nature of Order, Book 2 An Essay of the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (The Nature of Order, Book 2)
- The Solar House: Passive Heating and Cooling
- The Way We Live Alfresco
- Time-Saver Standards for Landscape Architecture
- Time-Saver Standards for Landscape Architecture
- Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design
- Traditional Mexican Style Exteriors
- Wine Country Architecture and Interiors
- 100 More of the World's Best Houses (100 World's Best Houses, Vol. 3) (Architecture)
- 100 More of the World's Best Houses (100 World's Best Houses, Vol. 3) (Architecture)
Books Index
Books Home
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- Physiology Of Plants Under Stress: Abiotic Factors
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, (Vintage)
Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2)
The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1)
