I am not going to lie to you. I still haven’t finished The Power Broker. I will finish it, I promise. I just haven’t finished it yet. I have no defence. But in my defence, it is 1,162 pages long, not including the notes and index.
My paperback copy of it — and this isn’t a joke — requires genuine physical effort to pick up. I have a substantial Portuguese water dog, and when he sits on my lap, it feels about the same as when I’ve had The Power Broker open on it. If I had to choose one book to use as a weapon, it would be The Power Broker. In August, I lugged it on a trip to France, and I felt nervous carrying it through customs.
“Anything to declare?”
“I have The Power Broker on me. I’m sorry.”
“Have you finished it?”
“We both know the answer.”
I was first supposed to read it in 1997, when I was in the middle of an ill-advised education in urban planning. Robert Caro’s...
Chris Jones is a former staff writer at Esquire and a contributor to The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of, most recently, Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies.
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