MAN IN THE MIRROR

The human toll of systemic failures.

Giridharadas (Winners Take All, 2018, and The Persuaders, 2022) has written a piercing account of a heart-rending public death that illuminated the plight of New York City’s homeless. In May 2023, Daniel Penny, a white former Marine, placed Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man suffering from schizophrenia and behaving erratically on a subway, in a chokehold that killed him. Penny was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in a trial that reflected broader tensions in a polarized country. The hardworking author comes at the story from numerous angles, shadowing outreach teams on overnight shifts, spending many hours with reform-minded health officials, and getting to know people living in encampments. His street-level reporting is interwoven with analysis of generational changes in mental health care. In the 1950s, a half-million people were in state mental health facilities; the total was greatly reduced during decades of “deinstitutionalization,” but proposed “community-based care” centers didn’t “launch on a scale commensurate with the need.” As a result, many people with serious mental illness were imprisoned. Neely was arrested several times and poorly served by a confusing bureaucracy and shelters where violent crimes sometimes occur. When a medical examiner testifies about Neely’s autopsy, his body “was now receiving from the city a level of consideration, respect, and focus that had not always been easy to realize in life.” Giridharadas is a strong writer, but he empties his notebook of seemingly every utterance he recorded, bogging down some chapters with a surplus of repetitive and minimally informative quotes. Even less unproductive are his observations on the appearance of the “Sephora-glazed” women supporting Penny, who wore “heavily caked” makeup and “were liable to dress like their daughters too long.” Snark undermines the book’s moral seriousness.  

Penetrating narrative journalism on the root causes of a tragedy that shocked and divided America’s biggest city.