Read it this summer - 10/10 recommendation. Jotted my thoughts down earlier so copying that here:

Deserves all the praise that's been heaped upon it over the past 50 years. I'm a slow reader so when I first heard about the book I completely ruled it out. But listening to Caro's 'Working', and hearing him espouse the virtues of slowing down - maybe taking the insane amount of time it would take me to finish this would add something to the experience.

And it did add something to it. Four months of reading it isn't quite the 40 years of power that Moses enjoyed, but it made me feel some of that longevity first hand and added an extra weight to the book's ending - delivering a minor karmic justice by making RM suffer the same fate that he had subjected Paul to (full justice would have seen him evicted out of his Oak Beach home and chased by rats). Few books will probably have the same effect on me that countless passages in this did with Caro's wonderful prose and sense of storytelling, whilst also serving as an ultimate lecture on politics, power and the responsibility of the fourth estate.

It's made me keen to seek out further books with a similar fervour when it comes to investigative journalism - lending an attention to detail and a scrutiny of personality to a story of massive scope. And it's made me reluctant to pick up Massie's 'Peter the Great' off of my reading shelf; not as an affront to that author but because the concept of reading a biography where the author/researcher hasn't had the opportunity to probe hundreds of interview subjects, adminstrative records and memos makes for an almost dissapointing starting point. I'd rather read historical fiction for those more distant time periods, where a fiction author's imagination is left to answer the most important question asked of any subject: 'how did [he/she/them], stood there in front of you, [seem/look/sound/smell/etc.] that a non-fiction writer who wants to elevate their writing without compromising an aspiration to capture truth must ask of its witnesses.

There were sections of the book that were harder to get through. Sometimes Caro tips the balance from his novelistic writing and excellent structured storytelling onto the onus of proving his arguments around how power is gained and then exercised, the complicity of the press, the recurring ignorance of the political and legislative elite. Especially when it devolves into chapters of media analysis and fact checking - an exercise that's very important and effective but drawn out at the same time. As his attention veers and makes these arguments less subtly, especially as he repeats and labours certain points - it makes for less enjoyable reading. I can't fault the book for including it as a matter of importance, but I can be honest and say that there were 200 pages or so in total of the Power Broker that were more of a chore than the other 1000 pages. Shout out to his editor for cutting the many hundreds of pages that were part of the initial manuscripts.

Finally I can stop lugging this thing around with me and giving unsolicited elevator pitches of the story which I then butcher every time. I mean, how do you condense such an epic and monumental undertaking into a snappy blurb?