Customer Reviews

The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York

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I have never been to New York and confess that I don't know as much as I should about the history of that great city. I was very pleased to find that Alyn Brodsky's book was not only educational but entertaining. I admit there were some parts that probably would appeal more to scholars and historians than to an average reader, but overall the book was fascinating. Mr. Brodsky did an excellent job presenting not only the huge number of facts and figures, but also the human, personal sides of the mayor and his people.

Alyn Brodsky's "The Great Mayor" seems ambivalent about the life and career of Fiorello La Guardia. Brodsky at times leans too favorably upon the often irratic behavior of the Little Flower in the consular service, in Congress, and in City Hall. Nevertheless, his portrayal of Fiorello's decline both politically and personally is quite frank and adds dimension to this well-researched and well-documented work.
A real treat that Brodsky's book offers is a perceptive political history of the City of New York and its characters. Tammany Hall receives a drubbing, as does Robert Moses, the venerated creator of the New York parks system.
Unfortunately, the book is poorly edited and suffers from a generous sprinkling of obvious syntax errors. A truly magnificent biography would not have seen such missteps. In the end, "The Great Mayor" remains a noteworthy contribution to the body of works about New York's history. It deserves to be read - and will be read moderately quickly - by fans of the Big Apple.

Alyn Brodsky has written arguably the definitive biography on Fiorello LaGuardia. The biography is very well written, and if you are interested in New York City and municipal history, an entertaining one to boot.
LaGuardia was a progressive Republican very much in the vein of Theordore Roosevelt and Robert LaFollette. Fiorello rallied against large corporate and governmental interests, and defended the lower economic classes. He was incorruptable. LaGuardia was an energenic human dynamo, and acted in what he thought were the best interests of those he was elected to represent. This he did when he was in the House of Representatives, representing at seperate times two Manhattan Congressional districts for 14 years, and later when he was Mayor of New York for 12 years. Corruption, graft, unfair profiteering, and particularly, exploitation of recent immigrants to the U.S. were hateful things to him.
Oh yes, he was onery, exasperating, stepped on a lot of toes, and could be quite the bully. Since his desired ends were for the public good and not personal gratification or ego building, most people, excluding his enemies, saw his antics more as amusing than derisive.
In this post 9/11 period, it is fun and educational to remember and learn that Rudy Giuliani was not New York City's only great mayor. In fact, Rudy often cited "The Little Flower" as the mayor he wished most to emulate. Kudos to Alyn Brodsky for his literary effort, and bravo to Mayor LaGuardia for his super human efforts and accomplishments.

The title of Alyn Brodsky's history, "The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York" suggests that his book will discuss two things: Mayor LaGuardia and how he shaped New York City. He delivers on both promises and then some. (Although I might argue that a more precise subtitle would be "...the Making of the Modern City of New York.")

This is a research-filled tome, but by no means dry. LaGuardia was too feisty a character to be made to look bland--and Brodsky lets LaGuardia exhibit all his unbridled emotions. But he doesn't let the reader forget the mind--the brilliance--behind the bellowings, poundings, and outrages. All of LaGuardia's ingenius (and some of his few not-so-ingenius) proposals and enactments are presented here--not just during his terms as mayor of the City of New York, but as a lawyer, congressman, and commander of America's brand new air force.

But this book is not an appeal for LaGuardia's sainthood. There was too much sulking, too much mean-spiritednes, too much selfishness to even think of such a canonization. What is testimony to Fiorello's greatness is that his greatness is still remembered to this day, in spite of the warts and all. So much for fulfilling the first promise.

In responding to the second promise, Brodsky clearly presents the City of New York before LaGuardia's career and the City after LaGuardia's career. The corruption, mismanagement, Tammany-domination of the City during the first three decades of the 20th Century are extensively rendered. And although these three things certainly did not go away after LaGuardia's leadership, they certainly were corrected to an enormous degree. And, who knows, if he had had his way, maybe they might have been eliminated all together.

Style-wise, the book is quite readable. I didn't fret over the occasional syntactical confusions but some of the metaphors and similes were jaw-droppingly bad. But I'm picking at stupid things here. "The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York" is a book as great as the mayor it wants us to remember.

That guy from Katonah must be a moron. Maybe he can't read at all. The book is an excellent, well-researched biography and an easy read. Brodsky does a wonderful job of bringing to life a man who was a real character and who defined NYC as we know it. He stands out all the more as a man of principle when compared to the kind of creeps we see today in politics. Admittedly FLG seemed to change into a bit of a megalomaniac toward the end of his career, but he still accomplished a great deal both for NYC and for the people of the US, whom he saw as his constituency. This is a first-class book. I highly recommend it.

1. If your book is THE GREAT MAYOR and your premise is that Mayor La Guardia made the modern city of New York, then you might consider not devoting 60% of the book to the time when he was not mayor.

2. Quips and asides -- why have these become acceptable in non-fiction? Interesting digressions used to go in footnotes, where they belong, and not inserted so as to confuse the direction of paragraphs that already have enough trouble figuring out where they're going.

3. Interpreting historical figures through modern eyes -- a fatal flaw for historians. They're supposed to be able to show history -- not decry that LaGuardia's support for black and women New Yorkers wasn't that of a modern person. At least we are spared La Guardia's opinion of gays, lesbians, and the trans-gendered.

4. Maps, anyone? Even native New Yorkers only carry a map of their own borough in their head. If you're making the premise that La Guardia changed New York, maps could have pointed out lots of areas of change.

5. Meticulously researched? I'm not that impressed. Pull out the secondary sources and the New York newspapers, and there's not all that much left.

6. And just thuddingly bad prose. Even the most favorable reviews find it jarring.

I'm truly stunned by this book. I can't believe how bad it is. I've only read 30 pages and I'm not sure that I can continue. I have read a fair number of books that I didn't like hoping all the while that they would get better but I have almost no hope of even making that claim for this book. It has all the stylistic flair of a high school essay and many of the problems typical of that quality of writing. Twice in the 30 pages that I have read I almost threw the book down in disgust. The degree of difference between the reviews and my opinion is so large that I wonder about my sanity. Could these reviews really be that far off base? It seems to me that they are.