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Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990
by Jonathan Mahler
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.
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.
"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)
"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
"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
This information about The Gods of New York was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jonathan Mahler is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the bestselling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, which was adapted as an ESPN miniseries, and The Challenge, a New York Times Notable Book. His journalism has received numerous awards and been featured in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Brooklyn.
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