The story is a familiar one: an idealistic young man grows into a tyrant. It’s the stuff of olden myth and palace intrigue. It’s also the stuff of Robert Moses, the most powerful man New York City has ever seen. In this epic biography (truly — it tops out at more than 1,000 pages), Robert Caro tells the tale of “America’s greatest builder,” the urban planner, who without ever being elected to office, used every mechanism of power at hand to construct the modern Big Apple — its beaches and parks and playgrounds and highways and tunnels and bridges and apartment blocks. In doing so, he turned from being a reformer into being a veritable emperor who seized land at will, destroyed opponents, misled the public and established his own minikingdom impenetrable to mayors and governors alike. With unstoppable narrative verve, Caro spins one of the ultimate tales of American ambition.