If you are a narcissistic megalomaniac, I know of just the right career for you: highway builder. That’s one of the lessons I learned from The Power Broker.

Building highways may not sound like a glamorous task, but there is hardly a legacy that is more lasting. In New York, Broadway (”Breedaway,” as it was called back then) follows the same Indian path that the Dutch widened when they settled Manhattan. In Atlanta, Peachtree Street follows the Peachtree Trail, first established by the Creek nation. In Europe, many modern highways follow routes first established by ancient Roman highways.

The warning brought about by “The Power Broker” has to do with a man whose power went unchecked for half a century, and whose vision was blindly stubborn. That he was a highway builder (among other things) meant that his vision would affect many future generations. The warning should give pause to anyone who seeks to use Band-Aid solutions to mitigate congestion.

Robert Moses — RM — gathered power for himself in a way that trapped him into his own vision. Author Robert Caro pointed out that when RM began his career, he would seek power for the sake of building things; and as he aged, RM built things in order to accumulate more power for himself. But from the very beginning, Moses was guided by his own vision, which he began to formulate at the beginning of his career. “The Power Broker” documented the path Moses took to, for example, build the West Side Improvement in the 1930s, a vision he first formulated in 1914. As much as circumstances may have changed in fifteen years, Robert Moses would not change his vision except to accommodate ways he could obtain the money necessary to pay for that vision.

The power Moses accumulated over the years served as part of the warning Caro offers. The power Moses held was not simply administrative — that he held 16 city- and state-wide posts at once was not enough. Moses wrote the laws that established many of the positions he held — laws that gave him an extraordinary amount of power, and made it very difficult to take that power away from him.

Through toll bridges, Moses had access to vast sums of money that could be used to justify an even greater wealth of bonding capacity, which would then be used to finance more roads and highways that served the toll bridges. All that money supplied thousands of jobs, which could be doled out to anyone who would subscribe to the Moses vision. And it was that vision that supplied seemingly endless profits to engineering firms, road-building contractors, insurance companies, banks, unions, political campaigns, and others. This road-building coalition served as a model for departments of transportation to copy throughout the country. (Here in Georgia the profits come, in part, from a dedicated tax on fuel.) In this sense, one difference between Moses graft and Tammany Hall graft was that Moses was able to dress his graft up to look honest.

Beyond tolls, the additional money supplied to him from the City and State came even as schools, police, fire, and other essential services were getting starved.

There is also another warning supplied by this book. While highways can be so strong as to leave a lasting legacy, Moses exposed the delicacy of the urban fabric by ripping it apart. Once-stable neighborhoods were transformed into exactly the sorts of traffic-filled, poverty-stricken, crime-ridden places that so-called American Dreamers paint cities to be. Crime and poverty immediately struck the places where the highways were laid down. Once-thriving neighborhoods were torn apart as residents were displaced by the tens-of-thousands. Businesses on either side of the highways lost half (or more) of their customer base — some to displacement, some to the inconvenience of a new highway dividing the neighborhood.

It is an odd sort of thing about cities. Part of what makes a great city is really in the details that “masterbuilders” like Robert Moses never thought of or cared about — and these are the details that make the city a delicate place. A strong city is a place full of delicate pieces that no highway-building bureaucrat could possibly appreciate.

Part of New York’s fall came after Robert Moses lost his power. The City descended into a staggering load of debt, and eventually had to be bailed out. Much of the South Bronx area, torn apart by multiple Moses highways, burned down as apartment buildings became worth more for insurance collections than they were worth in rent (or rehabilitation, or redevelopment). The highways — built in such a way to retain more permanence than Broadway or Peachtree — contributed to the weakness of the city. New York became, for a few decades, a weak city, full of strong highways.

Some have learned the lesson that the rise of an American dictator such as Robert Moses should never happen again. Cities are for people, not for cars. But many great American cities, torn apart by highways, remain torn apart to this day, choked in traffic, crime and poverty — problems that seem intractable to this day.

Robert Moses is dead. Long live Robert Moses.

If multiethnic writing is somewhere in your field of vision, you will find that American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism will be an essential part of your collection.

Of course, I’m only somewhat biased in saying this, considering the author of the book is my sister-in-law. In any case, I still remember reading the introduction back when the book was a transcript and found it remarkably accessible. So even if you’re not an English major, pick up a copy and enjoy.

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.

It took me a little over a month to finish reading Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show by Geoffrey Nunberg. In many ways, this book deservedly gets placed in the same category as Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant! Both books are essentially about the ways the English language has itself changed over the past forty or so years to the benefit of conservatives (or, false conservatives, or neo-cons, or whatever label you want to slap on today’s politicians in power).

The bulk of Nunberg’s book is what the title says it is. He effectively breaks down how language changed over the past half-century:

After conducting focus-group studies among rural voters and disaffected Bush voters in several states in 2005, the Democracy Corp’s Karl Agne and Stanley Greenberg concluded that while voters see Democrats as being more on the side of the middle class and working Americans, they “only see this manifested in costly government social programs or political alliances with labor unions and minorities.”

Then too — and these are by no means mutually exclusive — a lot of voters simply find cultural issues more compelling than economic ones. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as being determined to vote one’s social views come hell or high water: these people simply find one set of issues more stirring or infuriating than the other.

The issue of culture comes up again and again throughout the book. The issue isn’t whether Americans are divided by culture. The issue is how conservatives tend to divide America by focusing on cultural issues — and by bribing voters with the promise of lower taxes.

Despite the promise of lower taxes, conservatives tend to promise a government that costs more — thanks to defense:

You can see the difference in the changed meaning of “support the troops.” During World War II, that means buying war bonds or going on scrap drives; since Vietnam it has required only backing the administration’s policy or wearing a lapel pin. Patriotism has never been as low-maintenance as it is now.

That doesn’t mean that the word patriotism has no content, but it’s not simply a question of devotion to one’s nation anymore. If that were all there was to it, it wouldn’t be a contested notion. What passes for “patriotism” these days is really a matter of values and style, of conveying “toughness,” and of subscribing to a particularly combative view of America’s role. In that sense, it’s merely another aspect of the familiar cultural politics of the right.

Somehow, a warped view of “culture” trumped substance. And the higher cost of combative patriotism only means higher taxes down the road. The promise of lower taxes for the sake of lower taxes can only be described as bribery.

In the final chapter, Nunberg wraps up with a brief prescription for some of the linguistic problems that currently plague the party. He recommended David Kusnet’s Speaking American as “required reading for liberals.” When Bill Clinton said, “I’m tired of seeing the people who work hard and play by the rules get the shaft,” it was the beginning of a story that more Democrats should be tellling. Rather than acting as a party centered around issues (”tax fairness, the budget deficit, health care, homeland security, corruption and electoral reform, education, Social Security and pension protection, energy, corporate power, and generic Republican incompetence”), Democrats can take those issues and wrap them in a neat package — a narrative.

If the Republicans can craft a narrative that referrs to the made-up culture wars, the conflict between “regular Americans” and the “liberal elite,” Democrats can craft a narrative, too — but one that is a little less disingenuous than the so-called culture wars.

I have a few books I’ve finished lately that I’d like to review, but I’m reading faster than I can review ‘em. It doesn’t help that I don’t feel like I’m very good at reviewing books to begin with.

So rather than full-force reviews, just a few quick blurbs. I’ll start by getting this one comment out of the way: they’re all good books I’d recommnd if you’re interested in the subject. There. I said it.

Our Endangered Values by Jimmy Carter. In book form, Jimmy Carter seems to be a different person than he is when I read his occasional op-ed columns in the paper. His arguments are thoughtful and well-reasoned, but he’s clearly upset about the corruption of Christianity by the right. Near the start of the book, he lays out five repugnant characteristics of fundamentalists, including their tendency to “view change, cooperation, negotiation, and other efforts to resolve differences as signs of weakness.” Throughout the book, Carter quotes Bible passages to demonstrate how Christian fundamentalists have used narrow, selective readings to purposively misinterpret the meaning and spirit of Christianity — and how these purposeful misinterpretations have carried over into poor public policy. If you think you know Jimmy Carter because of what other people say about him, or because of his op-ed columns, you probably don’t really know Jimmy Carter.

Don’t Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff. This book is a good introduction for anyone who struggles with the subject of political debates — namely, trying to hold a respectful argument with a conservative who doesn’t want a respectful argument. Lakoff introduces the notion of the strict father view of the world versus the nurturant parent view of the world. Among the strict father’s more repugnant assumptions of the world, it’s a viewpoint that links morality with prosperity — that somehow, only good people become rich. Meanwhile, the two most important values of the nurturant parent are empathy and responsibility — from those values, others follow, like freedom, opportunity, fairness, open communication, community-building, and trust. The chapters that follow apply these notions to real situations.

How Cities Work by Alex Marshall. I relearned here some of what I learned in planning classes — the most important lesson of which is that the single most important influence on land use decisions is public infrastructure investment. Zoning ordinances pale in comparison to the influence of laying down roads, water and sewer lines, etc. As one of my professors liked to say to our classes, you could zone a farm field in Iowa as high density commercial, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Marshall subscribes to the school of thought (as I do, as well) that transportation is the most visible and active investment in shaping a place. There are many, many lessons in Marshall’s book worth regurgitating because they happen to be good lessons. My one criticism of the book is that Marshall seems to go a little far in his critique of New Urbanism, though his warning is one worth hearing: that (at least in the instances he cites) New Urbanism tends to be the same old suburban subdivisions “masquerading as something else.” This book is not one that should be ignored in the planning literature — it is rooted in a common sense level of thinking, a trait among many that is unfortunately not very common at all.

Apart from the books listed above, I also recently read James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, which recommend with a grain of salt, especially if you’re looking to be entertained for an evening. I think Kunstler’s favorite word is “cartoonish,” which he uses a lot to describe suburbia. It’s not that Kunstler is wrong — it’s just that he enjoys crossing over lines a little too much. Attention seekers like Kunstler don’t necessarily give a good name for advocates of good land-use policy. It seems that Kunstler’s real expertise is in the history of architecture, especially as it applies to suburbia. He does a great job of connecting Modernism with old puritan values, and showing how screwed up Modernist thinking tends to be. Kunstler is also a huge fan of New Urbanism, and it’s probably more for the aesthetic value of New Urbanism than its practicality.

My personal critique of New Urbanism is that New Urban developments tend to be whole developments (like the subdivisions that Marshall criticizes). Several months ago, I had a conversation with a local New Urban developer who referred to Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities as “the greatest book ever.” He proceeded to tell me that Jacobs’ point of developing one lot at a time was not as important as her other points in the book. But from a practical standpoint, Jacobs valued the diversity of the city above all other aspects — building large developments at a time tends to ensure homogeneity, not diversity.

In any case, these are the books I’ve read lately. I have 95 left on my list to go, though I’m quite sure as time goes on, I won’t actually read all 95 of those books. Next on my list: Talking Right: How conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freakshow. From what I’ve heard about it, the book will be kind of like Don’t Think of an Elephant, but better. We’ll see.