By: Robert Moses

Rating: ⭐️

One of the best biographies I’ve ever read. While ostensibly a biography about Robert Moses, the infamous city planner of New York City in the mid 20th century, it reads almost like a biblical or Shakespearean narrative. It has all of the ingredients of any great biography - it covers a topic everyone has some ambient knowledge of (New York City and its landmarks), an individual few people know about, and a clear narrative arc - Moses’ obsession and accumulation of power.

The book follows a clean arrow of rising and falling action, routinely casting Moses in a charitable or suspicious light. I imagine everyone who reads it will walk away with a different interpretation of Moses’ net morality (personally I found it to be negative). We start with a young and idealistic Moses obsessed with using his small perch to make the state conform to his version of “good” and see his slow destruction into a kind of Greek god - less a symbol of virtue and more a personification of some elemental force with the ability to petulantly reshape the world around him.

We also get a rich background image of state politics’ evolution from the turn of the century through the 1950s - the fall of Tammany Hall, FDR’s welfare state, and the Rockefeller governorship. Each wave brings a cast of supporting characters to serve as guides or foils to Moses’ ambition. His first fall from power in his early 30s serves as our character defining arc and begins his hero’s journey; his final fall at the end of the book serves almost as a cautionary tale. Ozymandias, the poem by Percy Shelley, immediately came to mind.

"Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

What struck me about Moses was his clarity in obsession - there are many historical figures who are nominally interested in accumulating power, but choose to measure it in a more concrete way (money, fame, land, information) and inevitably become idolatrous towards the measurement. By contrast, Moses seemed to have a clear understanding on the ultimate goal of accumulating power, many times to the detriment of the metric - he understood the importance of money in politics, but never became personally rich; he saw the importance of public opinion but never sought to become individually famous; he understood the value of certain property and areas but never directly enriched himself. All of these units were imperfect proxies for true influence, and by accumulating the underlying object, he was able to benefit from all of these proxies without actually stockpiling them himself.