THE GODS OF NEW YORK

Troubling times in Gotham.

As he did in the bestselling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, Mahler scrutinizes a tense moment in New York’s recent past, showing how the divisions that “consumed” the city under Mayor Ed Koch shaped its future and foreshadowed broader discord in the U.S. Mahler’s focus on exhaustively covered figures who held power, or were trying to get it, results in a solid if not revelatory book about four extraordinarily “convulsive and consequential years.” Koch, popular as his third term began in 1986, was soon damaged by his perceived mismanagement on numerous fronts. Corruption scandals undermined his administration. Homelessness surged, due in part to federal funding cuts, reductions in mental health in-patient care, and local government failures. AIDS was killing thousands of New Yorkers. With City Hall slow to act on the latter, playwright and activist Larry Kramer tried to out the closeted mayor and lambasted federal health officials like Anthony Fauci. Conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. said people with HIV should be tattooed to prevent its spread. Meanwhile, crack decimated poor neighborhoods, as “an inherently biased law” imprisoned many Black users and spared white users of powder cocaine. Violent crime and racial conflict stoked by tabloids made Al Sharpton famous and fueled international interest in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Rudy Giuliani’s profile rose as he prosecuted Wall Street crooks. And Donald Trump, after making some bad business deals, “was now refashioning himself into the city’s white id,” Mahler writes. When Trump made inflammatory statements after five Black and Latino teens were accused—falsely, it turned out—of raping a woman in Central Park in 1989, famed columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote that he had “destroyed himself” as “all demagogues ultimately do.”

A creditable look at a troubled metropolis and its publicity-hungry power brokers.