The Power Broker.

First edition of Caro's Pulitzer-Prize winning work on Robert Moses. Thick octavo, original black cloth, cartographic endpapers, illustrated with numerous photographs and maps, top stain red. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, "For Paul Schrader - with best wishes Robert A Caro." The recipient, Paul Schrader, is a screenwriter, director, and critic, has built a body of work defined by his preoccupation with moral crisis, alienation, and the psychological burdens of modernity. Drawing from his Calvinist upbringing and influenced by existential and transcendental philosophy, Schrader’s cinema often examines individuals estranged from society yet driven by an austere inner logic—figures such as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), Julian Kaye in American Gigolo (1980), and Reverend Ernst Toller in First Reformed (2017). These characters, shaped by guilt, repression, and obsession, embody Schrader’s recurring interest in the intersection of faith, violence, and the search for redemption. His stylistic restraint and focus on interior states reveal a fascination with the cost of moral conviction in a secular world, where the pursuit of order and purity often collapses into self-destruction. This fascination with the nature and consequences of control finds a compelling parallel in Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974), a monumental study of New York urban planner Robert Moses and his accumulation of political authority. Like Schrader’s protagonists, Moses emerges as a man consumed by his own vision of order—one that transforms civic idealism into domination through bureaucratic and infrastructural power. Caro’s analysis of how moral purpose becomes corrupted by the mechanisms of influence resonates with Schrader’s cinematic meditation on obsession and isolation: both artists explore how the will to impose structure on chaos—whether through architecture, policy, or personal discipline—can erode empathy and moral clarity. The Power Broker and Schrader’s films share a thematic concern with the paradox of power as both a creative and destructive force, revealing how ambition, when untampered by humility, leads not to transcendence but to alienation and decay. Near fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket. Jacket design by Paul Bacon. From the collection of Paul Schrader. An exceptional associaton.