The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. CaroMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A thorough and damning chronology of the Manhattan Machiavelli that from the mid-'20s to the late '60s cast an authoritarian shadow over Long Island and Manhattan. The megalomania-truly a quest for power in spite of sense or reason-could be the effective plot for a modern opera. Loathing common people - even harboring racist and anti-Semitic notions - he steamrolled and bulldozed for more parkways, parks, and bridge although he himself didn't even drive. He cruelly impoverished his own brother and grew physically deaf even as he was metaphorically deaf to the please of he cruelly displaced over the tenure of several NYC mayors.
Also interesting is the story of Flushing Meadows Park, the fourth largest public park in New York City, created out of the sites of the 1939/1940 and 1964/1965 New York World's Fairs. Earlier, The Meadows were a dump famously characterized as "a valley of ashes" in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
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