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kayo_20211030

Two of Caro's books remain in my favorites today: The Power Broker; and Master of the Senate. The concept of political power, mentioned in the conversation, is fully limned out in both of them. Worth reading by anyone with an interest in how the real world works. Unfortunately, Vonnegut, I never quite got. YMMV.

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The podcast 99% Invisible is doing a series of monthly episodes on The Power Broker. I don’t live in NY and I don’t pretend to really understand NY, but it’s so interesting to listen to the hosts as they work their way through Caro’s massive book. I really enjoy it and just wish the episodes were more frequent than once a month.

I can't endorse this more. I wasn't familiar with Robert Caro until this series started (I had heard of the LBJ biography but hadn't looked into it).

The interviews at the end of each episode is super insightful about how the structures of power continue to operate in the current day.

For those who wonder why Caro didn't write more about Jane Jacobs (in, e.g. The Power Broker)

https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/jane-jacobs-missing-chapt...

When I got the book honestly the first thing I did was to look for Jane Jacobs in the index, and I was surprised not to see her there. Thanks for this!

> The Power Broker

They really need to publish this in ebook form. It's so hard to read as a real book because of the size, and the only other way is audiobook.

I recommend tearing it in half.

What's ironic is that the book was originally excerpted in the New Yorker:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker#Reception>

(I'd thought it had been serialised, per a recent New Yorker Radio Our podcast episode, but Wikipedia suggests just only sections were published.)

Serialisation remains one of the more viable ways of making long works accessible, as well as financing their creation.

I recently saw a guy on Amtrak reading an old, maybe original edition hardback of The Power Broker and it was even bigger! Just way too big to be practical. By comparison the current paperback edition is almost portable.

I'm a fan of both Caro and Vonnegut, prefer some of his novels over others. Cat's Cradle is my favorite.

Player Piano and Sirens of Titan were the options when I was in high school. I can't remember which I read first but I liked it so much I begged to borrow a copy and read the other. I've never agreed with a lot of his viewpoints, and Vonnegut was (like all of us) a flawed human being, but his writing transcended a lot of that, which is somewhat odd because it's so incredibly personal. That contradiction probably says more about me than him.

t'other way about for me. I love Vonnegut loads so I read it, but discovered an American writer/reporter that I never heard of. Most interesting. Particularly that theme where idealists seek power to achieve objectives independently of functional democracy; it seems human, vital, problematic and American - all in a wholly positive way - but clearly different cultures have different takes on power and where the limits of 'visionaries' ought to be.

Vonnegut was that soldier described in some of his stories...WII prisoner during Dresden Germany fire bombing....his painting art is treasure as well.

(Meaning 2 of "limn" is "to outline in clear sharp detail", but as it is not Meaning 1,this is fine.)

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