The folks I’ve spoken with in the last week didn’t believe me when I said I was starting a new book. I had neglected, of course, to mention that I started reading another book, not writing one. And that book is The Power Brooker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. When Jane Jacobs began her famous The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she hit the reader at the start: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” While her attack was leveled at the whole field of planning at the time, her primary target was Robert Moses.

In these days and times, if you ask people to use single words they associate with “the city,” they’ll come up with words like, “crime,” “traffic,” “poverty,” “skyscrapers,” and so on. Some of these associations can be credited to Robert Moses, the man who built highways, parkways, bridges, playgrounds, and slum housing that even to this day resembles Pruitt-Igoe — only taller. He built the Long Island Expressway, also known as the world’s longest parking lot. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which was followed almost immediately by the complete social breakdown of The Bronx — a phenomenon from which the community is still trying to recover, half a century later.

This book I’ve started (reading, that is) is a long book — more than 1000 pages — so it will likely be a while before you see another book review from me. I’m only 80 pages into it, but I’m hooked. It was recommended to me by so many people that I couldn’t ignore it. And so far, I’m happy to have gotten those recommendations.