Editor’s Note: Every year as we enter the holiday season, we take a moment to pause and look back on the best books we encountered (not a “best books of 2023″ list, but a list of the best books the Chefs read during 2022 — the books might be classics, a few years old, or brand new). In recent years we expanded our list to include any sort of cultural creation or experience our Chefs wanted to share. 

Part 1 ran yesterday, Part 3 is now available as well.

Joe Esposito

A friend urged Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York on me soon after it was published in 1974. I looked at it, got distracted, and did not pick it up again until this past year. What a mistake: the book is a masterpiece. I was prompted to look at it again by a documentary, Turn Every Page (2022), on the relationship between Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, which was produced and directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb. I found the documentary to be informative, astute, and loving. The subjects deserve no less: what a triumph of authorship and publishing!

Moses, born at the tail end of the nineteenth century, was the principal architect and builder of the infrastructure of much of New York, City and State. The list of his accomplishments is stunning (think of parks, parkways, highways, bridges, even Jones Beach). I have lived most of my life in and around New York, and I now realize that it was all a house that Moses built. Moses was brilliant, an elitist, amazingly accomplished, arrogant, devious, racist, and contemptuous. He achieved power through brains, determination, lies, and intimidation. He was also immensely popular, as the public loved the parks and beaches he was masterminding. That popularity was the source of his power, as no politician — not FDR nor his nominal boss, Fiorello La Guardia (whom Moses referred to as a “little guinea son of a bitch”) — could afford to fire him. And thus the man shaped New York into what it is today, an automobile-centric city, with public amenities distributed unevenly to the various groups that comprise the city’s population.

The book exists on three levels. First is the biography itself, which is astonishing and disturbing at the same time. Moses is a creep! But people loved him because, as the book’s chorus says, he got things done. Every few pages I found myself reflecting on the similarities with Elon Musk.

The second level of the book is a history of New York, its political culture in particular, over five decades. The corruption and cynical politics are breathtaking; and hard as it is to believe, it was really worse then, in the age of machine politics, compared to today, when it is merely sickening. Some portraits are unforgettable: Al Smith, the governor of the state and huge supporter of Moses, and FDR, who does not come off well in this book, which characterizes him as devious, vindictive, and petty.

Finally, this is a book, on the meta-level, about Caro himself. It is a tour de force of journalism, astonishingly well researched, clearly written, and packed with the telling detail. Let me offer just one: in order to prevent the poor from getting to the new parks and beaches on Long Island, Moses connived to have the overpasses built too low to accommodate buses, which thus denied access to the poor who did not own cars. I wonder if there was anyone in New York government at the time whom Caro did not interview, any document he did not study carefully. This is why the Gottlieb documentary about him is called Turn Every Page.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, but it comes with one caution: it is 1,700 pages long; the audio version is sixty-six hours. For some reason there is no e-book version. But it is worth putting in the time. I wish I had read it decades ago.

Roy Kaufman

Sometimes, especially when I am travelling or when a lot is happening in the world, I struggle to connect with books. In those times, magazines, newspapers and podcasts absorb my then-especially short attention span.  When this happens, I look for a good “world-building” novel to break the cycle.

When I consider of world-building novels, I typically think of the first in any great (or for that matter, reasonably good) fantasy series such as JK Rowling’s Harry Potter or the His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. Occasionally however, someone is skilled at world-building when working with our world. To me, the master of this is James McBride. I previously read Deacon King Kong, about life in Brooklyn projects in the late 1960s, where a church Deacon shoots a young man who he used to coach in baseball but who is currently dealing drugs.

McBride’s new book, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, is about the relationships between Black and Jewish residents of “Chicken Hill,” a neglected-by-the-town neighborhood in rural Pottstown, Pennsylvania to which these outsiders have been relegated. The story begins with a mystery of found human remains, a dancing Hasidic man, and a quasi-biblical flood. It then moves backwards to a time not so long ago when the town held an annual Klan parade and the residents of Chicken Hill here expected to make themselves scarce. In modern times of progression and regression, McBride reminds us of people’s complexities.