He started from a “Parks Department” and ended controlling a self-financing transportation empire.

It takes zeal or determination to read every page of that book, but many people would benefit from skimming it for the high points, to get the big picture.

A punchline is that Moses was never elected to public office but shaped the New York metro area far more than most elected politicians during a career that lasted decades.

The topic of what makes a good legislator reminds me of a quote attributed to Wilberforce. To paraphrase freely, …It is exceptionally rare for anyone to be highly effective in Parliament unless they are first elected to that body before they are thirty years old.

Wilberforce’s point being that the craft of skilled government takes a life to learn, and unless you start young the odds are strongly stacked against you.

Offhand that quote eludes me online. It is quoted in a book called The Politician, a how-to book at least a hundred years old, which exists as a slim paperback.

My favorite part was how Moses, “best bill drafter in Albany,” took advantage of the fact that few read the bills before passing them to insert specific clauses he used much later to build and consolidate his own power in office.

It was assigned reading in a course called “Bureaucratic Politics” taught by Prof. Doug Madsen at Iowa. We had an edited volume of relatively turgid (yet demanding and important) scholarly papers, and in theory we were supposed to read that whole book. I don’t know if many of the students managed it.

My favorite part (which I go back and read repeatedly) is how Al Smith got his start in the Tammany machine.

It has various sociological insights. For example, Bob Moses’ mother was one of the society women who, as an educated and assimilated society woman of German-Jewish background, volunteered in a settlement house to help Americanize the Russian-Jewish immigrant hordes.