The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York (1974)

Caro demonstrates how New York's fragmented geography of islands, peninsulas, and tidal waterways compelled Robert Moses to re-engineer the entire metropolis through titanic bridges, causeways, and parkways. The volume brilliantly unpicks how rocky schist outcrops and natural shoreline barriers were brutally reshaped to forge the modern automobile era in steel and concrete.