The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. Enormous and incredibly informative about politics, city planning and public relations.
I read this too, and perhaps this isn’t a popular opinion given how people revere this book, but I found it to be 5x longer than it needed to be for the average reader not immersed in NYC from that period. The number of meetings and characters introduced felt unnecessary. I get that he is a historian trying to recreate the record of what happened and did so masterfully, but for the vast majority of readers I think it would be improved to have a “digest” version.
It was much longer and Caro had to cut tons of material, including, infamously, his chapter on Jane Jacobs. That led people to constantly ask him why she isn't in the book. "Every time I’m asked about that, I have this sick feeling."
At the time, I asked, “Can’t we do it in two volumes?” Bob Gottlieb answered, “I might get people interested in Robert Moses once. I could never get them interested in him twice.”
