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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12741
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| Posted: 01 December 2014 at 6:36am | IP Logged | 1
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THE POWER BROKER: ROBERT MOSES AND THE FALL OF NEW YORK, by Robert Caro.
Nearly 1,300 pages...!
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Robert Lloyd
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 October 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 238
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| Posted: 01 December 2014 at 7:37am | IP Logged | 2
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Marvel Essentials Avengers #8:
It has lots of great John Byrne art. It makes me want to go out and purchase John Byrne's entire run of West Coast Avengers. I'll have to go on Amazon.com and see I can get them in paperback.
You'll have to pardon me if I don't remember everything perfectly. It did bring back lots of great Marvel memories of times gone by. They don't make comics like this anymore. However the Marvel of today is not something that really interests me. My dose of Marvel comes in the form of old Essentials paperbacks I can still get at Books A Million for under $20. It shutters me to think that comics today are ...gasp...$3.99 each and up!
The book had it's jump the shark moment in the Korvac Saga. The Avengers had to board a bus to arrive at Forest Hills to confront Korvac. The team's security clearance was stripped from the U.S. Government, so the Avengers could not use their Quinn Jet or fly in U. S. air space to arrive at Korvac's home. When I read the Korvac saga today I just can't get over the silliness of the plot...and the fact that I took this book as serious comics literature when I was a young lad. |
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 01 December 2014 at 7:43am | IP Logged | 3
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THE POWER BROKER: ROBERT MOSES AND THE FALL OF NEW YORK, by Robert Caro.Nearly 1,300 pages...! •• At about page 800 I reached a point where I wanted to build a time machine and go back and kill the guy!!!!
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Robert Lloyd
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 October 2013
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Posts: 238
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| Posted: 01 December 2014 at 8:07am | IP Logged | 4
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Enterprise: The First Adventure by Vonda N.McIntyre:
Great first adventure in the saga of the Enterprise. Written back in 1986, it has a version of how the crew met on their first mission. The hardcover edition has a great wrap around cover painting.This has got to be the third time I've read this novel over the course of a decade or so. Some Star Trek books stick with you and are better written than some of the TV episodes or movies. I happen to really like this one because the author gets the characters right.
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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
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Location: United States
Posts: 12741
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| Posted: 01 December 2014 at 8:17am | IP Logged | 5
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At about page 800 I reached a point where I wanted to build a time machine and go back and kill the guy!!!!
***
Ha ha!
Yes, yes. Such evil....! He destroyed my city... even all of America!
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 02 December 2014 at 11:34am | IP Logged | 6
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TOPPER by Thorne SmithPublished in 1926. Half a dozen years later it became a popular movie starring Constance Bennett, Cary Grant and Roland Young. Well, the title did, anyway. And some of the character names. But, wow! So far the book is SO different from the movie! And, based on where it seems to be heading so far, I have trouble imagining how it can swing much closer to the movie's plot!
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Vinny Valenti
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 8133
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| Posted: 02 December 2014 at 11:42am | IP Logged | 7
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Ooh, I'd love to have a Robert Moses conversation. IMO,
bottom line was he was a jerk, but amongst that were
necessary evils, that ultimately benefited (and yes hurt in
other cases) the NYC area. Since the Verrazano Bridge just
turned 50, there's rumination online by longtime Staten
Islanders about how how it ruined their borough. Thing is, if
Moses didn't build that bridge, somebody else would have.
The geographic advantage of that Bridge can't be denied-
imagine having no alternative but to go through Manhattan
every time you wanted to get from Long Island to New
Jersey, Michael. That route's a nightmare now as it is -
imagine how bad it would be today had the bridge never
been built.
Now, with my "praise", there's also criticism, too - Moses
could have opted for a smaller grade on the bridge so that
subways could have run on the lower level, but he
intentionally didn't. We may have needed most of the roads
he built, but we also needed more mass-transit options,
too. Train travel between boroughs that don't involve
Manhattan is still atrocious.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 02 December 2014 at 11:58am | IP Logged | 8
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Moses' greatest crime was making the City and its environs totally dependent on the automobile. His other sins cascaded from there.
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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
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Posts: 12741
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| Posted: 02 December 2014 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | 9
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Robert Moses ripped the living guts out of nice, decent, entrenched communities, uprooting hundreds of thousands, and all in service of cars cars cars! And he was wasteful beyond conception. On a single bridge alone, as Caro noted in 1974, he over-spent on interest alone $40,000,000. If that figure represents 1974 values, that's $115 billion in today's money -- on one bridge alone!!!
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Vinny Valenti
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| Posted: 02 December 2014 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | 10
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"Moses' greatest crime was making the City and its
environs totally dependent on the automobile. His other sins
cascaded from there."
I can't argue with that. It's completely ridiculous that at the
moment the only way for freight rail to go from the mainland
USA to east of the Hudson River is via a bridge all the way
up by Albany. That basically excludes all of New York City,
Connecticut and Long Island - basically anything south of
Boston and east of the Hudson from freight rail from the
rest of the country, requiring the use of trucks to carry
freight instead - in one of the world's most densely-
populated areas. No wonder the LIE is called the world's
longest parking lot.
(Yes, there's a train car float that can take freight trains
across NY Harbor from New Jersey to Brooklyn's
abandoned LIRR tracks, but that still only covers Long
Island and it's too cumbersome that it doesn't get much
use).
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Vinny Valenti
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| Posted: 02 December 2014 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | 11
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"Robert Moses ripped the living guts out of nice, decent,
entrenched communities, uprooting hundreds of thousands,
and all in service of cars cars cars!"
-----
Still some of that is a necessary evil. Let's talk as fellow
NYers here - I know that there's always talk about how the
Cross Bronx Expressway ruined certain parts of the Bronx,
but I maintain that those areas wound have eventually
suffered anyway. The South Bronx has no highway running
right through it yet that didn't keep that area from
deteriorating during the 70's and 80's. The Bushwick
Expressway was supposed to cut through Brooklyn via the
current Conduit Boulevard and Bushwick Avenue and link
with the Williamsburg Bridge. That plan was scrapped, and
now the only way to drive from Southern Long Island to
Manhattan is to go all the way around the coast of Brooklyn
and Queens - leaving the poor Belt Parkway to handle the
brunt of it, and that can't even carry trucks, which must use
the streets that never became the Expressway instead. But
Bushwick and East New York deteriorated even without the
highway being built - granted Bushwick is now experiencing
a resurgence.
On the other hand, the Clearview Expressway was plowed
through Bayside, Queens (meant to go all the way to JFK
Airport, but now truncated at Hillside Avenue due to
community opposition - why didn't the Clearview ruin
Bayside? It's still a very nice area.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 02 December 2014 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | 12
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Problem is, you cannot take a finite space like Manhattan and make it wholly dependent on automobiles. But Moses wasn't concerned with that. He was in charge of bridges, so he built bridges. And with the bridges came the cars -- and the congestion -- and the pollution -- and the consumption of real estate by parking lots.
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