“A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history, The Gods of New York offers 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, for better and for worse. . . . A must-read.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life
“This rollicking chronicle of New York City at the end of the 1980s, by a staff writer for The New York Times magazine, tells a story of near death and glamorous rebirth. Mahler captures a metropolis emerging from economic crisis to become the capital of global finance, while navigating AIDS, crack, homelessness, racial unrest and the power plays of larger-than-life characters like Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump.”—The New York Times
“Jonathan Mahler finds the origins of our own time in the squalor, strife, and sleaze of 1980s New York. Full of pathos and wry humor and replete with a colorful gallery of rogues, winners, losers, dreamers, and killers, The Gods of New York is a triumph of civic humanism. . . . A deeply enviable book.”—John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke
“Expansive yet fast-paced . . . an astute, propulsive history of the ‘entrenched’ inequality and zany politics that came to dominate the city and the nation”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A propulsive, gorgeously reported account of the forces that reshaped New York City in the late 1980s, The Gods of New York is brilliant historical non-fiction that doubles as a warning about the future. With its clashing crew of sharp-elbowed political players—visionaries, provocateurs, and grifters, and sometimes, all three at once—and its juicy, behind-the-scenes details of the tabloid stories that spiked the period like an EKG chart, The Gods of New York is a rollicking ride with a heartbreaking undercurrent.”—Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun
“The Gods of New York may be the best nonfiction book ever written about the city. Jonathan Mahler evokes the names of my youth—Bernie Goetz, Tawana Brawley, Ed Koch, Yusuf Hawkins—but he manages to both personalize the New Yorkers of the fateful years 1986-1990 and to fly over the city in a metaphorical helicopter, giving us a clear map as to how the city changed not just itself, but the country to which it is tenuously attached.”—Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends
“Jonathan Mahler has pulled off a magic trick, evoking the sepia glory of the decade of me in the city of me while also showing the fatal flaws baked into the revelry. The sunken, lost world of this book died with the corruption disguised as optimism known as the Reagan years, the canary in our civic mineshaft. All this happened both a long time ago and yesterday, undone by the same root causes now sweeping our land, proving that what happens in America, good and bad, happens first in New York. This is a story about the Big Apple, about the tree that birthed this forbidden fruit, and about the worms hiding inside.”—Wright Thompson, bestselling author of The Barn
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