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The Power Broker (Pulitzer Prize Winner) de Robert A. Caro

The Power Broker (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Autor Robert A. Caro
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 12 iul 1974

O siluetă impunătoare privește de la înălțimea unui zgârie-nori peste un New York care încă nu știe că îi aparține. Nu este un primar, nici un guvernator, ci un om care a înțeles că adevărata autoritate nu se obține prin vot, ci prin controlul resurselor și al infrastructurii. Robert A. Caro semnează o investigație jurnalistică monumentală care transcende biografia clasică, oferindu-ne o anatomie a puterii brute exercitate timp de peste patru decenii de Robert Moses. Subliniem aici o structură narativă cinematică ce urmărește transformarea unui tânăr idealist într-un „împărat” urban care a remodelat New York-ul după bunul plac, cheltuind 27 de miliarde de dolari pe proiecte care au definit metropola modernă. Stilul lui Caro îmbină rigoarea academică cu tensiunea unui roman politic, dezvăluind cum Moses a creat „Triborough”, o entitate cvasi-guvernamentală care funcționa în afara controlului democratic. Reținem finețea cu care sunt descrise jocurile de culise și rivalitățile cu figuri precum Franklin D. Roosevelt sau Nelson Rockefeller. Cine a apreciat portretul din Boss de Mike Royko va găsi aici aceeași profunzime biografică, aplicată însă unui context mult mai vast: cel al construcției fizice a unei națiuni. Dacă în Master of the Senate Caro explorează mecanismele puterii legislative, în The Power Broker el analizează puterea care se betonează în autostrăzi și poduri. Această lucrare rămâne piatra de temelie a operei lui Robert A. Caro, stabilind standardul pentru tot ce a urmat, inclusiv celebra serie dedicată lui Lyndon Johnson, prin capacitatea unică de a transforma datele istorice în literatură de înaltă clasă.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780394480763
ISBN-10: 0394480767
Pagini: 1296
Dimensiuni: 171 x 246 x 66 mm
Greutate: 1.86 kg
Editura: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte oricui dorește să înțeleagă cum funcționează cu adevărat politica și urbanismul în spatele ușilor închise. Cititorul va câștiga o perspectivă fascinantă asupra modului în care viziunea unui singur om poate altera iremediabil viața a milioane de oameni. Este o lectură esențială pentru pasionații de istorie americană și pentru cei care vor să vadă cum puterea absolută modelează, dar și corupe, idealurile inițiale.

Despre autor

Robert A. Caro este un istoric și scriitor american de prestigiu, dublu laureat al Premiului Pulitzer și câștigător al National Book Award. Recunoscut pentru capacitatea sa extraordinară de cercetare, Caro a dedicat decenii studierii puterii politice, fiind celebrat pentru uniunea perfectă între rigoarea istoricului și talentul artistului narator. În 2010, a primit National Humanities Medal din partea președintelui Obama. Trăiește în New York, unde continuă să lucreze la biografiile sale monumentale care au schimbat fața literaturii non-ficționale contemporane.

Recenzii

"Surely the greatest book ever written about a city." --David Halberstam

"A masterpiece of American reporting. It's more than the story of a tragic figure or the exploration of the unknown politics of our time. It's an elegantly written and enthralling work of art." --Theodore H. White

"The most absorbing, detailed, instructive, provocative book ever published about the making and raping of modern New York City and environs and the man who did it, about the hidden plumbing of New York City and State politics over the last half-century, about the force of personality and the nature of political power in a democracy. A monumental work, a political biography and political history of the first magnitude." --Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York

"One of the most exciting, un-put-downable books I have ever read. This is definitive biography, urban history, and investigative journalism. This is a study of the corruption which power exerts on those who wield it to set beside Tacitus and his emperors, Shakespeare and his kings." --Daniel Berger, Baltimore Evening Sun

"Fascinating, every oversize page of it." --Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

"A study of municipal power that will change the way any reader of the book hereafter peruses his newspaper." --Philip Herrera, Time

"A triumph, brilliant and totally fascinating. A majestic, even Shakespearean, drama about the interplay of power and personality." --Justin Kaplan

"In the future, the scholar who writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort." --Richard C. Wade, The New York Times Book Review

"The feverish hype that dominates the merchandising of arts and letters in America has so debased the language that, when a truly exceptional achievement comes along, there are no words left to praise it. Important, awesome, compelling--these no longer summon the full flourish of trumpets this book deserves. It is extraordinary on many levels and certain to endure." --William Greider, The Washington Post Book World

"Apart from the book's being so good as biography, as city history, as sheer good reading, The Power Broker is an immense public service." --Jane Jacobs

"Required reading for all those who hope to make their way in urban politics; for the reformer, the planner, the politician and even the ward heeler." --Jules L. Wagman, Cleveland Press

"An extraordinary study of the workings of power, individually, institutionally, politically, and economically in our republic." --Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal

"Caro has written one of the finest, best-researched and most analytically informative descriptions of our political and governmental processes to appear in a generation." --Nicholas Von Hoffman, The Washington Post 

"Caro's achievement is staggering. The most unlikely subjects--banking, ward politics, construction, traffic management, state financing, insurance companies, labor unions, bridge building--become alive and contemporary. It is cheap at the price and too short by half. A milestone in literary and publishing history." --Donald R. Morris, The Houston Post

"Irresistible reading. It is like one of the great Russian novels, overflowing with characters and incidents that all fit into a vast mosaic of plot and counterplot. Only this is no novel. This is a college education in power corruption." --George McCue, St. Louis Post-Dispatch 


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Descriere scurtă

For the sheer magnitude, depth and authority of its revelations, The Power Broker stands alone---a huge and galvanizing biography revealing not only the virtually unknown saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power, but the hidden story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York through the past half-century.

Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders have known: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of our time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens--the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses--and brings to light a bonanza of vital new information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.

But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man--an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches--and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of (never sufficient) highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the accumulation of power became an end in itself.

Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear--his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"--a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses--an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time--without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system.

Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars--he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder.

This is how he built and dominated New York--before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work, and his will, had been done.