Books like The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

01

The Path to Power

Robert A. Caro · Biography

The first volume of Robert A.

Both dig into power.

02

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin · Biography

Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Abraham Lincoln's formation of his cabinet — which included his three main rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination: William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates — is one of the most widely discussed leadership books of the twenty-first century and one of the most readable biographies of the Lincoln era.

A kindred biography read.

03

American Prometheus

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin · Biography

Kai Bird and Martin J.

A kindred biography read.

04

Annals of Imperial Rome

Tacitus · History

Tacitus wrote the Annals in the early second century CE as a history of Rome from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero — the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, covering roughly 14 to 68 CE.

Shares power and corruption with The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

05

Lenin

Victor Sebestyen · Biography

Victor Sebestyen's Lenin is a biography that aims to restore the man behind the mythology — both the Soviet mythology that made him a saint and the anti-communist one that made him a simple monster.

Both dig into power.

06

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn · History

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, first published in 1980, retells American history from the perspective of those who rarely appear in conventional textbooks: Native Americans, enslaved people, industrial workers, women, immigrants, and dissidents of various kinds.

Both dig into power.

07

Barbarians at the Gate

Bryan Burrough · Business

Barbarians at the Gate is Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's account of the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, at the time the largest corporate transaction in history.

Both dig into power.

08

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo · History

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo's account of three years spent in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum built on reclaimed land next to the international airport.

Both dig into corruption.

09

Beyond Good and Evil

Friedrich Nietzsche · Philosophy

Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche's assault on the philosophical tradition he had been trained in and had grown to distrust.

Both dig into power.

10

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's second book proposes a reframing of American racial hierarchy: rather than thinking of racism primarily as prejudice, she argues that the United States has operated as a caste society, with Black Americans at the bottom of a rigidly maintained hierarchy similar in its structure — though different in its specific mechanisms — to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

Both dig into power.

11

Googled: The End of the World As We Know It

Ken Auletta · Business

Ken Auletta has been writing about media and power for the New Yorker since the 1990s, and Googled is his attempt to explain what Google did to the industries that preceded it.

Both dig into power.

12

History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides · History

Thucydides' account of the twenty-seven-year conflict between Athens and Sparta stands as the founding document of political realism and the first work of history that treats evidence and causation as problems to be solved rather than stories to be told.

Both dig into power.