Sublime

One of John’s most frequently told stories—so frequent it grew stale—was about the day he first watched the film with Spielberg in the spring of 1993. “You need a better composer than I am,” John said to Spielberg. “You’re right,” Spielberg replied: “But they’re all dead.”92

One measure of the career of Robert Moses is longevity. His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter—until the day in 1968 when he realized that he had either misunderstood Nelson Rockefeller or had been cheated by him and, in either

Without Alan Grant’s transformation from a man who despises children to a man who loves them, Jurassic Park is just another dinosaur movie in a long line of dinosaur movies, simply with better special effects.

He had total confidence in the people he hired.

ROBERT MOSES was born on December 18, 1888. He was not given a middle name—because his mother saw no reason for one. Bella Moses was a strong-willed woman, so strong-willed, in fact, that some of her relatives said she was too much like her mother—and not enough like her father. Bella’s parents, Robert’s grandparents, were first cousins.

rapacious

Moses built public works costing, in 1968 dollars, twenty-seven billion dollars. In terms of personal conception and completion, no other public official in the history of the United States built public works costing an amount even close to that figure. In those terms, Robert Moses was unquestionably America’s most prolific physical creator. He was