How to read a great book

Robert Caro's Power Broker, and some guides to powering through it.

Hey sub-stackers — are you tired of skimming five-minute articles while you take a dump? Are all those hot takes on AI by some “I am a data scientist” rando turning you into a superficial cabbage? Do you have a sneaking suspicion that the latest “I too have political opinions” article may not be teaching you anything? Do you yearn to read a real book, by someone who’s done more than five minutes of “research” on the internet?

In short: are you interested in the complete opposite of modern media?

If so, I have the perfect book for you.

The Power Broker, by Robert Caro.

The Power Broker won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. It is considered by many to be the greatest non-fiction book ever written.

There is only one problem. It is 1162 pages long, plus notes.

That is one brick of a book. Sure, lots of people have read The Lord of the Rings, at 1069 pages in my copy, but LOTR pretends to be three books, a more manageable proposition, and involves stirring battles and the struggle of good against evil and plucky little people with hairy feet. The Power Broker is about a 1930s New York bureaucrat, Robert Moses. New York may sound potentially glamorous, but Robert Moses did not engage in a single shoot-out with mobsters, or fight a 50-foot stop-motion gorilla, or save the city by solving riddles with Samuel L Jackson. Moses built parks and highways.

Now you may wonder why anyone would want to read such a book.

That was the view of Robert Caro’s first editor, who warned him to expect a small print run. That was before Caro delivered the manuscript, almost seven years later, and it was over a million words long.

What is so great about this book?

Is it the story of its creation?

Certainly — Robert Caro started in 1966, and in 1967 was awarded a one-year Carnegie fellowship to finish the book. He thought it would take six months, and then he and his wife Ina could take the rest of the year off and go on holiday to Paris.

A year later the money was gone and he had barely begun.

For five years he worked with almost no contact with other professional writers, and the entire project took on an air of unreality¹. When the book came up among regular people, he dreaded the question, “How long have you been working on it?” He was plagued by continuous doubts that it was all going horribly wrong. Then in 1971 he was given a desk in the Allen Room in the New York Public Library, and for the first time he met other serious writers. When a famous biographer asked him the dreaded question, and he sheepishly answered five years, the guy replied, “That’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.” In an instant his doubts evaporated.

There is lots more to the incredible story of Caro’s determination to finish this book — which everyone told him no-one would read. One place to hear some of it is in a podcast discussion with The New Yorker editor David Remnick from 2019. Listening to that conversation would be my first suggestion in helping you to read this book. Caro’s voice alone is enough to make almost anyone fall in love with him, and his humour and humility will catch the rest.

My second suggestion would be the 2022 documentary, Turn Every Page, about Caro’s relationship with his long-time editor Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb was as much a legend as Caro; he edited Joseph Heller, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and hundreds of others, and the sight of the two of them, at the end of the film, sitting on either side of a table, each armed with a pencil, ready to argue about semi-colons, is one of the most heartwarming sights for a book lover in these book-beseiged times².

Turn Every Page also includes a wonderful montage of people establishing their serious-person credentials on Covid-era Zoom calls, by making sure that their copy of The Power Broker is clearly visible on the shelf behind them.

There is also a moment where Caro says that he phones in his lunch order to a deli near his office. “By now they recognise my voice,” he says. Ha! — who wouldn’t recognise that voice? There are probably lines of people outside that deli every day, asking if they can have a job answering the phone.

When Gottlieb received the million-word manuscript, he pointed out that it was too large to be printed in a single book. Caro suggested multiple volumes. Gottlieb said, “I might be able to convince people to read one book about Robert Moses, but I won’t be able to convince them to read two.” Over 300,000 words (several regular-sized books!) were cut, and their loss was just one part of the complex decades-long relationship between writer and editor.

Is it the story of Robert Moses?

Certainly — it’s not just that Moses built parks and highways. He decided the shape of New York, a shape that it has been stuck with since he was finally wrested from his network of roles in 1968. He held phenomenal power for over forty years, and no-one could stop him, not mayors or governors or bankers or billionaires. Pretty much the only fight he didn’t win was against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. How he acquired his power, and how he wielded it, are some of the most incredible stories you will ever read, from his heartbreaking demolition of thriving neighbourhoods to his grotesquely hilarious fight with the Columbia Yacht Club. Moses is by turns cartoonish and monstrous, and his calculations and manoeuvrings wonderfully clever and thoroughly despicable. This is a character who looms large, and his amazing story deserves every page Caro gives to it.

(I will write later about the book itself, and what I took from it, and from the Robert Moses story. I’ll give you a little while to read it yourself first.)

Is it the amazing writing?

Certainly — it takes a unique talent to keep your interest, and your understanding, through so many details and so many pages.

Caro employs some of the simplest techniques in the most adroit way. He frames the story in terms of big themes and clear questions. How did Moses get his power? Why did people let him keep it? What did he want from it? And he repeats the questions again and again, to keep the basic frame of the story within view. Caro has said that throughout the writing he knew the final line that he was working towards: “Why weren’t they grateful?”

He shamelessly uses the most basic methods of drama to keep your interest. Many sentences begin with the once-shunned “and”, and many chapters end with the pre-internet equivalent of “You won’t believe what happened next.” Sections are framed as mini-dramas — you’ll be biting your nails as Moses hustles towards the $109,000,000 necessary to build Riverside Drive. (Costs are always written out as full dollar amounts; I can only assume this was another aesthetic choice; “$109 million” just doesn’t look impressive enough.)

His famous (or infamous) use of lists was inspired by the lists in The Iliad. He modestly clarified that of course he doesn’t claim to be as great as Homer, he just borrowed the technique. I personally found The Iliad a drag. I would say the comparison elevates the ancient book over the modern, not the other way around.

The language has a rhythm that allows Caro to spool out the most wonderfully long sentences, full of detail after detail, but it is done clearly and cleanly and beautifully; it is the opposite of tangled technical language, and instead is often the simplest language imaginable. Sometimes the statements are so simple that you can imagine them being crossed out from a child’s essay assignment, and you wonder how he could dare to make such a definitive and bold statement, and then you flip to the notes and see that the statement is backed up by interviews with absolutely everyone involved, and by reading every associated document. When Caro says, “This story was not reported in any newspaper at the time”, you know that before typing those words he scoured archive copies of every local newspaper.

Is it Caro himself?

Certainly — and this is maybe the biggest aid to reading his book.

If you want an excellent, and surprising, celebration of the man, try the kick-off episode of the 99% Invisible “breakdown” of The Power Broker, featuring Conan O’Brien. Yes, Conan O’Brien. He proselytises for Caro like no-one else. He worships him as a man from another time. Caro works in an office by himself all day, yet “This guy is dressed as if he’s going into the Oval Office for a meeting... He has such respect for the work he’s doing that he wears a blazer and a tie.” He writes on the same typewriter that he has always used, and has a collection of spare parts and ribbons, because his particular model is no longer manufactured. O’Brien suggests that one of the best things that could be done for writers throughout the world is to set up a Caro webcam, so that writers could tune in and take solace from the sight of Caro sitting at his desk, every single day, just working.

The 99% Invisible podcast series was my own secret to getting through the book. Each month in 2024 — the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication — they discussed just under 100 pages. I started later in the year. I used the episodes as reading milestones: after each reading, I listened to the corresponding episode.

I didn’t much like the episodes. Sure, Roman Mars has a glorious voice, almost as good as Caro’s. It is so rich and authoritative that you cannot feel anything but the deepest envy for anyone blessed by it. When people are talking, and he purrs, “Uh-huh, yeah,” as they speak, all I can think is, if someone said, “Uh-huh, yeah,” like that when I spoke, I would be cured of self-doubt for the rest of my life. If he turns up at my deathbed, and he responds to some pathetic utterance with his characteristic, “Ah, yeah, that’s fascinating,” then my life will likely be extended by at least a further decade.

That said, I wasn’t especially interested in listening to a 45-minute summary of pages I had just read. After the summaries they would talk to a guest. Some of the guests were famous, like the current stars of progressive US politics, AOC and Pete Buttigieg, or Mike Schur, who wrote The Good Place. But none of them really added anything to the book; in some cases I was a bit sceptical that they had even read the book. And then there were episodes like the one with the guy who made a video game with a Robert Moses-like character. Seriously? I’m not sure what kind of insightful analysis and additional information I was expecting to get, but some fella talking about his video game was not it!

On the other hand, without dividing the book up between 12 episodes, maybe I wouldn’t have read it? And three episodes were great — the teaser episode with Conan O’Brien, and the first and last of the main episodes, which featured Caro himself.

Now we were getting some juicy extra insights! For example: in the days after The Power Broker was published, Caro was given an office at Knopf in case he needed to use it for interviews. He was there one morning in despair over a bad review he’d just read in the New York Times. And then who should stop by to say hello? None other than Joseph Heller. I mean — Joseph Heller! Gottlieb had suggested that he cheer Caro up. “Hey kid, forget about it!”³

In the last episode he is asked about the difficulty of writing such a huge book. Did he ever feel that the material of the book was just growing and growing, and he had completely lost control of it? He answered, chuckling, “Yeah, I felt that way for basically seven years.”⁴

How did he do it? How did he keep going?

The Power Broker does not answer that question.

But the rest of Caro’s career does. This is simply the nature of his character.

His next project was a multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. As with The Power Broker, the project grew in the research and in the telling. Robert Caro has been writing his Lyndon Johnson biographies ever since⁵.

I was born in 1974 (I also celebrated a 50th anniversary last year), so that means Caro has been working on one of his Johnson volumes every year of my life. Caro was researching Johnson, and interviewing people about Johnson, and writing about Johnson, all through the presidencies of Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again. He was writing about Johnson when Lennon was shot, and when the Berlin Wall came down, and the Twin Towers, and when the microwave oven became popular, and the VCR, and the PC, and the internet, and smartphones. All that time he’s been sitting in the Johnson library in Austin, or his office in New York, steadily researching and writing books.

He has published four volumes so far. (I’m currently on the third.) The long-awaited last volume will cover the passage of civil rights legislation, and the Vietnam War.

Last week Caro turned 90.

So to read these books is not just to immerse yourself in a kind of writing and depth of research and dedication to a single task that is as inspiring and hopeful as anything that exists today, but also to be part of a continuing drama. While you are reading, Caro is tapping his way towards the end of his final volume. Will he make it? As you read, that question takes on monumental significance. As you read, you become part of perhaps the greatest literary drama of our time.

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References.

1. Robert Caro talking with David Remnick. (Discussion starts at 2:09.)

2. Turn Every Page, documentary, 2022.

3. Breaking Down the Power Broker with Conan O’Brien. (99% Invisible)

4. The 99% Invisible Power Broker Breakdown.

   1. Episode 1, with Robert Caro.

   2. Episode 12, with Robert Caro.

   3. Links to all episodes are on this page.

The books.

1. The Power Broker, 1974.

2. The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

   1. Volume 1: The Path to Power, 1982.

   2. Volume 2: Means of Ascent, 1990.

   3. Volume 3: Master of the Senate, 2002.

   4. Volume 4: The Passage of Power, 2012.

   5. Volume 5: stay tuned!

3. Working, 2019.

1. Caro recounts these experiences in the chapter “Sanctum Sanctorum for Writers” in Working. (See References.)

2. There is a great Paris Review interview with Gottlieb and some of his authors here. The paywall was briefly removed after his death in 2023, but sadly has returned.

3. News of a Robert Caro/Joseph Heller encounter may not floor you, but it floored me. If Caro wrote the best non-fiction book ever, Heller wrote the best novel. As I have previously discussed.

4. At 1:01:00 in Episode 12.

5. Everything I previously knew about Lyndon Johnson came from the bonus disc of Billy Joel’s River of Dreams album, where he described the “funk” America was in during the three months between the death of John F Kennedy and the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. This dismal time was summarised by an impersonation of the drawl of the dull new president: “Lyndon. Baines. Johnson. With big ears”. That’s all I knew about him: Boring and big ears. In Mr. Joel’s long semi-retirement since that album, I can only assume that, as a lifetime resident of Long Island, which was entirely transformed by the parks and beaches and miles and miles and miles of disastrous highways that Robert Moses built across it, he has himself read and enjoyed The Power Broker. And perhaps also gone on to discover that Lyndon Johnson was a much more fascinating character than he previously realised. Yep — Billy Joel would have made an inspired choice of guest on the 99% Invisible Power Broker Breakdown.