Volume 21, Number 16 · October 17, 1974
Emperor of Concrete
By Gore Vidal
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
by Robert A. Caro
Knopf, 1,246 pp., $17.95
This little sermon occurs in a book called New America published in 1867 by an Englishman named William Hepworth Dixon. Since Mr. Dixon was a journalist of absolutely no distinction, one must take very seriously what he says because he only records the obvious. After a year among us it was plain to him that in the name of law and order Americans are quite capable of building themselves a prison and calling it Happy Acres or Freedom Park and to reach this paradise all you have to do is take your first left at the Major Deegan Expressway out of New York; then your second right just past Hawthorne Circle and so on up the Taconic State Parkway to where the Caesarian spirit of Robert Moses will lead you into the promised land.
Review, 6035 words
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