Quick, raise your hand if you've ever heard of Robert Moses. I hadn't until I was told about The Power Broker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses by Robert Caro. All Moses did was totally rebuild huge swaths of New York City and Long Island between the 1920s and 1960s. He built nearly every expressway, parkway, modern bridge, and state park in the area, as well as Shea Stadium, the UN building, and other structures too countless to mention.

Rest assured, however, that this is not some dry book on urban planning. As the title of the biography suggests, Moses was immensely powerful, perhaps the most powerful man in the state. He crafted laws that gave himself unchecked powers, and he ruthlessly brought down his enemies through deception, treachery, and media manipulation. The book has one of the best descriptions, better than Citizen Kayne, of an ambitious young reformer's descent to corruption. Moses, of course, took great issue with the biography, and hammered out a 23 page typewritten response that can be found here. In it, he taunts his opponents who charged that he didn't do enough for mass transit by saying, basically, that if they don't have mass transit, it's because mass transit proponents weren't ruthless enough to get it built.

As Robert Moses often said, "If the ends don't justify the means, what does?"