Reading Groups

Robert Caro's The Power Broker with Brad Vogel

10 Sessions Wednesdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:30 pm EDT April 9 to June 11, 2025

The Center for Fiction

The ‘With Books’ option includes the title required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
Weekly on Wednesdays, 4/9–6/11
In Person at The Center for Fiction

While Robert Caro’s classic The Power Broker turned 50 years old in 2024, its incisive and exhaustive look at the legacy of Robert Moses and the nature of power in New York City remains highly relevant. We’ll get to know this tome (it’s not quite as intimidating as it might seem!) and the urban development stories it highlights as a jumping off point for a broader study of power in our own time: Where does it reside? How is it wielded? Why is it so hard to pinpoint? What can we do about it? This will be a fun romp through a truly thought-provoking and relevant work with a literary quality. We’ll focus on The Power Broker, but additional topical readings (not required in any way) and resources will be made available. If nothing else, you’ll come away with a greater sense of why the city you experience is the way it is. With luck, you’ll emerge as a more enlightened and potent New Yorker capable of challenging power—and dropping great anecdotes at cocktail parties.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Participants should read Chapter 1 of The Power Broker by Robert Caro in advance of the first meeting.

What to expect from this reading group: This will be a fun, intellectually-stimulating, free-ranging-but-ultimately-centered discussion of the lessons of The Power Broker – with an eye to making each participant a better student (and, I hope, critic/skeptic) of power. This will be an instructor-led and thematically-guided course, but participant engagement is very much encouraged, as are efforts to weave in relevant considerations of history, civics, urban planning, sociology, literature, anthropology, geography, and more.

Reading List:

The Power Broker by Robert Caro

Capacity: 20

Led by

Brad Vogel

Brad Vogel

Brad Vogel is the author of the books Find Me in the Feral Pockets (featured in the New Yorker in spring 2024) and Broad Meadow Bird. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and a variety of journals. A graduate of Tulane Law School, he is a writer, creative producer, guide, and historian. He previously served as executive director of the New York Preservation Archive Project, a fellow with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in post-Katrina New Orleans, and captain of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. His community activism extends to civic battles over Penn Station redesign, the Gowanus rezoning, urban forestry, Blue Highways waterborne freight systems, and public waterfront access.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

Groups+Workshops

More Groups+Workshops

Groups+Workshops