Political & Public Figures

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The Man Who Knew

The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

By Sebastian Mallaby

Sebastian Mallaby’s biography follows Alan Greenspan from a statistics-obsessed childhood and early career as a jazz musician through economic consulting, Republican politics, and more than eighteen years as chair of the Federal Reserve. Its central concern is not simply whether Greenspan was a brilliant policymaker or a principal architect of financial disaster. Mallaby instead examines the contradiction between Greenspan’s ability to recognize economic danger and his reluctance to use public power against leverage, speculation, and asset bubbles. The result is simultaneously a life story, an institutional history of the Federal Reserve, and an account of the transformation of American finance after World War II. By tracing Greenspan’s encounters with Ayn Rand, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and successive presidential administrations, the book shows monetary policy as a product of political calculation, incomplete evidence, personal influence, and ideas about markets. Gr…

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The Power Broker

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

By Robert A. Caro

Robert A. Caro’s monumental biography examines how Robert Moses transformed New York’s physical landscape while building a political empire largely insulated from voters. Following Moses from idealistic reformer to dominant public official, Caro shows how command of legislation, public authorities, patronage, toll revenue, and overlapping appointments enabled one unelected man to influence parks, highways, bridges, housing, and urban renewal for decades. The book gives substantial attention to the achievements associated with that power, including beaches, parkways, playgrounds, and major infrastructure. Its central concern, however, is the human and democratic cost: displaced neighborhoods, weakened institutions, racial and class inequalities, and a transportation system oriented toward automobiles rather than mass transit. More than a biography, The Power Broker is an investigation of how power is acquired, concealed, exercised, and eventually lost—and of how governmental machinery…

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