The Power Broker

Tonight Michael and I finished Robert Caro's marvel of a book.

We read it in 15-page portions, except when we just had to read more. I can’t say that any book I have read, in recent memory, has taught me more about the way the world we live in works. And for anyone who has ever lived in New York (I did for four years) it throws everything on its ear, and makes you look at the city in a totally different way.

Perplexed about 2025 and its projected major players (power brokers, so many of them)? This book is both a “how to” manual and a cautionary tale about someone totally obsessed with systematically chasing and holding, for the longest time, ultimate power. And the long tail of his power has wagged its way into the second decade of the 21st century, where a good deal of cleanup is still happening.

It is beautifully written. So clever. So honest. So earnest. So satisfying. All 1166 pages of it.

You can look at a preview here.

And make sure to read Michael's excellent post about the book.

Who knows what 2025 will bring?

For anyone who has kept a blog as long as I have (it will be twenty years in February), there is a lot of personal history and writing that you may want to preserve. This blogger platform has been so great for my needs, but I can't help feeling how much I would have to lose if Google could no longer support it.

I have taken action over the past few years to copy most of the posts that I have made (leaving out the ones that only have links, or leaving out the parts of the posts that point to links) into document files and export them as PDF files. I keep those files on my computer, and also have them saved in Dropbox.

If you want to see how I have done it, you can go to this post.

You can also use sitesucker to download everything as you would see it online.