A deep and sustained effort to avoid work this afternoon led me to a wonderful archival post of Gore Vidal’s 1974 review of The Power Broker in the NY Review of Books. The opening line is devastating on at least three levels, so much so that it’s inspired me to start a running series searching for similar material.
“For thirty or forty years I have seen the name Robert Moses on the front pages of newspapers or attached to articles in that graveyard of American prose the Sunday New York Times Magazine section.”
But really, the book apparently won a Pulitzer Prize, and the review is wonderfully written even if the bite of Gore’s offhand scornful asides begins to fade after the fourth or fifth time.
smq.world 