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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly Addictive -- A Home Run, May 1, 2005
Jonathan Mahler has hit a home run with this excellent examination of New York City politics, baseball and social life in 1977. The dual narrative focuses primarily on the titanic, four-way struggle for Gracie Mansion involving Koch, Cuomo, the incumbent Abe Beame and Bella Abzug, as well as the incendiary Steinbrenner-Martin-Jackson triangle of animus in the Bronx.
The sweltering summer of 1977 also featured the Son of Sam serial murders and power-failure-induced rioting - the City's worst civic disorder since the Civil War - and Mahler skillfully weaves these compelling events into a captivating, past-faced narrative. Ground-zero of the rioting was the Bushwick section of Brooklyn - less than a decade before a stable, working class neighborhood - and Mahler provides a vivid portrait of the chaotic mayhem that took hold there (as well as in other poor communities) when the lights went out on July 13.
Mahler also shows how the ghetto rioting transformed the Mayoral race. In mid summer, Ed Koch, then a relatively low profile Congressman, was fourth in the polls, mired in the low single digits. However, the erstwhile Greenwich Village liberal recognized that New Yorkers were ripe for a stern, law-and-order message. In particular, Koch's embrace of capital punishment and his get-tough policies generally found resonance with an electorate that had grown weary of the culture of lawlessness that increasingly pervaded their lives. The long-shot candidate - David Garth, his campaign guru, placed Koch's odds at no better than 40 to 1 - rode voter outrage to a first-place finish in the Democratic primary, and after besting Cuomo in a runoff, to City Hall.
Meanwhile, up in the Bronx, the season-long hostilities between the egocentric Reggie Jackson and his combative manager flared famously in an ugly confrontation in the visitor's dugout at Fenway Park. Steinbrenner sided with his million-dollar superstar (Mahler calls Jackson New York's first black superstar; I'm not so sure), the fans overwhelmingly with the pugnacious Martin. Despite the team's success, the melodrama off the field eclipsed the drama on the field for much of the season - until Jackson's prodigious, three-homer performance in the last game of the World Series. Mr. October's Ruthian feat helped the Yanks capture their first world championship in 12 years and set everything right - at least until next season.
I am a compulsive reader, but found this book especially addictive. I think you will, too.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History of Greed, Violence, Passion, and Regret, July 1, 2005
If you lived in New York in 1977, then you lived in heaven and you lived in hell. It's so different now that it might as well be a different city, but all of its denizens who are over thirty remember the old days well. Jonathan Mahler's book goes over some of the same territory as Spike Lee's fantastic movie SUMMER OF SAM (1999) with Adrien Brody and John Leguizamo, and has some of the same feeling, but he adds baseball to the mix in a big way and of course, the piece de resistance, the inside scoop on the big mayoral contest between Koch and Cuomo. If you like the second volume of Caro's life of LBJ, I think you'll like this book for it has some of the same down to the wire excitement. However, unlike Caro, there are no real heroes in LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING, just real people who fight for their lives in real situations.
In hindsight it's easy to see why David Berkowitz became the poster boy for everything that went wrong in New York, but back in the day, before we knew who he was, it was a scary time for all of us, not only the women with long hair who were said to be his primary targets. (Women cut off their hair or wore it up in scarves or turbans, even in the shattering heat.) Fear of Son of Sam was the other side of the disco experience that reached its glorious peak on the dancefloors of two dozen giant nightspots, of which Studio 54 was the most sought after. Way up in the Bronx, the Yankees were enduring what seemed to be a giant power contest between ownership, management and a few cocksure players, and yet the string of wins they produced buoyed New Yorkers' feelings as had few other resurgences in baseball. (Recent Red Sox World Series win is a parallel.) The streak united a city which had been falling apart almost literally. For, as Mahler shows, the infrastructure set into place of the physical locations of New York had been seriously neglected since the peak days of Robert Moses, and through the Wagner and Lindsay administrations had been allowed to crumble as though that were natural. The whole city went Gothic, looked like the ruined abbey of Aleister Crowley's Thelema.
Funny to think it took a baseball team to make a city regain its pride, and an ill-conceived and homophobic street slogan, "Vote for Cuomo, not the H---" to cause the tide to turn in favor of Koch, for once all of the gay activists heard this slur, we bound together and decided that whatever it took, despite our personal reservations about Koch, his politics, and his irritating personality, we would unseat Cuomo and adopt Koch as our boy.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Behind the Scenes, from the Yankees to the Son of Sam, April 25, 2005
If only history was like this in high school!
Incredible behind-the-scenes baseball reporting capturing, among others, a racist, envious but somehow still-sympathetic Billy Martin, a preening, calculating, self-defeating but heroic Reggie Jackson, and a cast of unvarnished Yankees stars that tells you more about what the majors were like (and presumably still are) than 5,000 made for the ESPN-age interviews about just trying to help the team win.
Add to the mix the real, untold story of how the Son of Sam was caught, the minute-by-minute account of how one Con Ed employee's personal meltdown in front of a switchboard led to the system-wide meltdown known as the Blackout of '77, and the frank reminiscences of two Bushwick beat cops who tried to keep the peace that night, billy-clubs in hand, and you get a taste of what's in store.
Mahler has an incredible nose for what's interesting and, like Tucan, he follows it to the unknown behind-the-scenes stories that give you a visceral sense of what happened. Forget spin, this is like listening to history across a dinner table from the folks who drove it. And with this cast of characters -- from Billy and Reggie to Cuomo and Koch to the Son of Sam and the detective who finally brought him to justice -- the tales are far better than anything I'll ever hear over a meal.
A fascinating book that's also a quick, lively read. If you have any interest in baseball, politics, criminal investigation, the 70's, the Black Out or NYC in general, you will love it.
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