Friday, May 11, 2012

Friday Read

Biographer Robert Caro's fourth installment of his Lyndon Johnson biography was released earlier this month.  In 1974, Caro wrote a biography of Robert Moses, the city planner who completely changed New York City.  The book, The Power Broker, won the Pulitzer Prize.  An excerpt of the book was published in the New Yorker in July 1974.  It is a long article, but it's a great read that's still relevant today.  The last five or so pages show Moses' brilliance as he crafts a bill using language with multiple layers of meaning that no one bothered to read closely, but that gave Moses unlimited power.  If you read a lot of legal disclosure documents you'll appreciate this section.

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