Robert Caro: Human Cost

[W]hen I began researching Robert Moses’ expressway-building, and kept reading, in textbook after textbook, some version of the phrase “the human cost of highways” with never a detailed examination of what the “human cost” truly consisted of or of how it stacked up against the benefits of highways, I found myself simply unable to go forward to the next chapter. I felt I just had to try to show—to make readers not only see but understand and feel—what “human cost” meant.