The Gods of New York
Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990
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4.5 • 37 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • A sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in 1980s New York that changed the city forever—and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation—from the bestselling author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning
“A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history . . . a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born and why all of us continue to live with the results.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Economist, The New Yorker, Town & Country
New York entered 1986 as a city reborn. Record profits on Wall Street sent waves of money splashing across Manhattan, bringing a battered city roaring back to life.
But it also entered 1986 as a city whose foundation was beginning to crack. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illnesses. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.
The events of the next four years would split the city open. Howard Beach. Black Monday. Tawana Brawley. The crack epidemic. The birth of ACT UP. The Central Park jogger. The release of Do the Right Thing. And a cast of outsized characters—Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Rudy Giuliani, Larry Kramer—would compete to shape the city’s future while building their own mythologies.
The Gods of New York is a kaleidoscopic and deeply immersive portrait of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This is the story of how that happened.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times Magazine staff writer Mahler (The Challenge) provides an expansive yet fast-paced history of the final chaotic years of New York City's 1980s. Mahler characterizes the era as one of overlapping crises: Wall Street's 1987 Black Monday crash, the rise of crack and homelessness, the growing AIDS emergency, and the "widening racial divide and the anger and resentment beneath it," which reached a boiling point with several vicious murders and beatings of Black men by white mobs and the lightning-rod trial of subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz. Mahler also profiles a media-savvy cadre of high-profile eccentrics who were "perfectly suited for this moment," among them U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, ACT UP firebrand Larry Kramer, "activist and opportunist" Al Sharpton, and Donald Trump. (He keeps things fresh by highlighting lesser-known incidents as well, like Mayor Ed Koch's "public spat with a ten-year-old homeless boy.") Mahler evocatively portrays how the tension peaked in 1989; in particular, the rape of a jogger in Central Park and the arrest of five Black and Hispanic teens, known as the Central Park Five, for the crime serves as metaphor for the city's fracturing and marks the moment Trump transformed into "the city's white id" through his infamous pro–death penalty newspaper ads. It's an astute, propulsive history of the "entrenched" inequality and zany politics that came to dominate the city and the nation.
