Robert Caro has spent thirty-eight years writing the biography of one man.

Tradecraft:

Gottlieb has questioned the veracity of Caro's reporting only once. There was a single paragraph that stood out on what would become the 214th page of The Power Broker. In it, Bella and Emanuel Moses, Robert's parents, were depicted at their summer lodge at Camp Madison, a camp for poor and immigrant children that Bella had helped found. There, they were leafing through The New York Times one morning in 1926, Caro wrote, when they learned of a $22,000 judgment against their son for illegal appropriations. Caro included a quote from Bella Moses, who was long dead: "Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life and now we'll have to pay this."

How, Gottlieb asked Caro, did he get that quote?

Caro told the story. Moses had instructed friends and close associates not to talk to him. Shut out, Caro then drew a series of concentric circles on a piece of paper. In the center, he put Moses. The first circle was his family, the second his friends, the third his acquaintances, and so on. "As the circles grew outward," Caro says, "there were people who'd only met him once. He wasn't going to be able to get to them all." Caro started with the widest circle, unearthing, among other things, the attendance rolls and employment records from Camp Madison. Now some four decades later, Caro tracked down, using mostly phone books at the New York Public Library, every now-adult child and every now-retired employee who might offer him some small detail about Robert's relationship with his parents. One of the employees he found was the camp's social worker, Israel Ben Scheiber, who also happened to deliver The New York Times to Bella and Emanuel Moses at their lodge each morning. Scheiber was standing there when Bella had expressed her frustration with her deadbeat son, and he remembered the moment exactly.

"So that's how," Caro told Gottlieb.

"Every step of that story is by all ordinary standards insane," Gottlieb says today. "But he didn't say any of it as though it were remarkable. We're dealing with an incredibly productive, wonderful mania."

This is why journalists are irritable about "narrative journalism", about fudging the facts in the service of some underlying truth. It's also why the difference between "theater" and "journalism" was so important in Mike Daisey's Apple show.

He bristles at the word obsessive, his eyes flashing through his thick, dark glasses. "That implies it's something strange," he says. "This is reporting. This is what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to turn every page."

This guy is such a bad-ass. And let me be the 90347947th person on HN to urge you to read _The Power Broker_ immediately.

I'm breaking the rules here, but this article is so good it cries out for a boost. I almost didn't look at it because the topic sounds so boring. What a mistake that would have been. It is simply gripping.

This is the second long-form piece about Caro and his new book I've seen this week (the other is in tomorrow's New York Times magazine - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/magazine/robert-caros-big-...). Interesting how similar the facts they tell are, but the angle is very different in each.

Great PR by his agent no doubt, but both enjoyable reads -- well worth the time to read them both.

"Caro has been at his work for so long, his books span the modern history of book making. The Path to Power, published in 1982, was printed using hot-metal typesetting, on a Linotype machine; its handsome cover lettering was drawn meticulously by hand. Means of Ascent, published in 1990, was part of the computer-mainframe generation. Master of the Senate, published in 2002, was the easiest to create, via desktop publishing."

The production manager for the books has a career that has spanned three distinct technologies. So will our careers (I've done teletypes and punched cards). Its all so short isn't it?

Back on something like topic for this forum: did you notice how Caro uses a specification for his books? Those outline sheets pinned up on the notice boards?