Man in the Mirror
Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 29 sept 2026
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- $199.00
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation
“A tour de force of sharp-eyed reporting, powerful narrative, and heartbreaking tragedy. . . . Brilliant and spellbinding.”
—Robert B. Reich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Coming Up Short
In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.
Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning—and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters’ strivings and struggles—to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice—reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character’s eyes and then another’s, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life.
At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On May 1, 2023, white ex-Marine Daniel Penny choked to death Jordan Neely, a Black unhoused and mentally ill former Michael Jackson impersonator, on a New York City subway. This outstanding revisitation of that fatal incident from bestseller Giridharadas (The Persuaders) begins with profiles of both Penny, who grew up in West Islip, Long Island, where residents see N.Y.C. as "a place of danger," and Neely, whose childhood was shattered by his mother's murder—eerily also by a chokehold. But the author also delves into an expansive web of individuals connected to the event, among them Moses Harper, a fellow Michael Jackson tribute artist; formerly unhoused anarchist Johnny Grima, who struggles with guilt after seeing Neely's corpse on the subway floor; and health commissioner. Ashwin Vasan, who challenges Mayor Eric Adams's draconian approach to homelessness. The author follows these individuals into New York's post-pandemic struggle with how to care for "its most desperate citizens," from social workers' plucky attempts to get unhoused people into shelters to destructive and ultimately futile encampment sweeps that result in camps relocating mere blocks away. The author's impressionistic observations about the city's economic contradictions, as when he describes a "hard-up" man with no feet lying down near a restaurant offering a "$368 ten-course dinner," set the tense stage for a concluding look at Penny's 2024 acquittal, which hinges, per Giridharadas, on "who gets to be granted the assumption of humanity." This is an indelible meditation on American inequality.
