Customer Reviews

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Jonathan Mahler's Ladies & Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning is an excellent book on a year in the life of New York City. The year is 1977 and it was a year marked by incredible turmoil. The city is under a fiscal crisis, there is a blackout that leads to massive looting, the Son of Sam killings and other problems. There is also a mayoral race and the Yankees race towards the World Series. Mr. Mahler perfectly melds all these elements together. He bounces between stories first starting out with 1976 Bicentennial celebration and ending up with the Yankees winning the World Series. He focuses on the struggles of Mayor Abe Beame, Yankees manager Billy Martin and the Yankees new superstar Reggie Jackson as well as Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and the detectives on the Son of Sam case. He weaves these stories together and shows how New York City was on the brink of collapse and how these people and events did battle for the soul of the city. The book takes the tome of a Shakespearian saga and is a truly engrossing story.

The 1970s was not a great time for major cities nationwide. It was a point where the optimism generated from The Great Society came crashing down, the racial divide became cavernous and urban decay was a standard of living.

New York City swallowed the bitter pill in 1977 with a citywide power outage and massive looting that followed, a mayoral campaign long on oftentimes nasty rhetoric but short on tangible solutions, the Son of Sam murders and an emerging style of newspaper reporting of style over substance. And before I forget, there was the diamond opera of George, Billy & Reggie in "The House That Ruth Built."

Author Jonathan Mahler does a spectacular job in weaving so many storylines in a concise history of a city in crisis. It is highly readable and moves with a swift pace of a novel and again shows how fact is stranger than fiction when politics ambles to home plate and egos are larger than simple commonsense.

Jonathan Mahler's The Bronx is Burning is really a time capsule and not a book. Turning each page, the reader familiar with the times remembers a New York very much different than the one he or she knows now. The unfamiliar or younger reader will perhaps find it hard to believe that such a New York existed about thirty years ago. Exist it did indeed, and Mahler captures the agony and the ecstasy wonderfully.

Weaving the threads of sports, race and politics into a complex tapestry, the author paints a fascinating picture of late 1970s New York. I am not much a sports buff but Mahler's story brought back memories of the wild feud between the blue-collar, scrappy Billy Martin and Superstar Reggie Jackson. Jackson's three home runs on three consecutive first pitches still feel exhilarating, and Mahler captures the essence of this achievement and its relationship to a city almost down for the count.

After a large blackout struck the city, riots and looting broke out and large segments of the city were devastated. The Mayoral candidates at the time, Mario Cuomo, Bella Abzug and Ed Koch, embodied differing feelings about the riots and the rioters. Koch eventually won the race and New York began its journey back from the precipice of bankruptcy and social anarchy. Mahler paints a rich tableau, placing all of the actors in the context of a troubled city. The much maligned Abe Beame, the Camelot mayor John Lindsay, provocative journalist Jimmy Breslin, Reggie's teammate Thurman Munson, Koch's so-called "beard" Bess Myerson, the Son of Sam, are all here. Each adds to the swirling, heaving history of New York. Mix in some disco, punk, Studio 54, and the gentrification of SoHo and you have a fascinating and entertaining story. Mahler has done a great job of capturing what New York was like in 1977. It was a helluva a year.

New York City of 1977 was a very different place from New York City today, and, as an entertainment business, Major League Baseball was in its infancy, although the game itself has changed only moderately. I was a 16-year old New Yorker that summer, and for those with my profile---bred in NYC, baseball fans, now of a certain age---this masterful book is an unceasing pleasure.

It is really two books: one, a social history of New York City in that year---featuring the blackout, Son of Sam and the mayoral election (Abzug, Beame, Cuomo, Kotch and more--an all-star cast from the past) as the main events around which the time and place are evoked. The other book is the story of the soap opera that was the 1977 Yankees, a.k.a., the Bronx Zoo.

Both books within this book (and the tale jumps back and forth between the two, with little integration) are honestly, accurately rendered. This is really what New York City was like that year (as well as the Yankees). In truth, it was not a happy time, and Mahler's rendition neither softens it with a nostalgic lens nor exaggerates its harrowing moments. It is just true. And, if you lived it, I think you will greatly enjoy this trip back.

Because the two aspects of the book--social history and baseball story--are so independent, I might not recommend this book to someone not interested in both. Nonbaseball fans will be bored with the Yankee machinations, and for those looking for a "baseball book," this aint it. A finally caveat is that the material is so much a part of my own experience, that I'm not sure how much I was filling in blanks or investing passages with emotion from my own mind. A friend of mine whom I would have expected to greatly enjoy the book rated it as O.K.---but my friend is from California.

For a recreation of that time and place, however, this book is superb. And make no mistake, New York City in 1977 was no ordinary time and place. I certainly wouldn't have the City go back to those days of muggings and head shops and disco, which was also the launch point for punk rock and, tragically, for AIDS in this country. But there was a certain grittiness and (dark) form of "aliveness" that no longer exists in the Starbucks world. So enjoy this guided tour through the not-so-distant past.

(This review was written days before the launch of ESPN's miniseries of the book and about a year after I read it. The advance reviews I've seen of the miniseries are ominous. It the series stinks, don't let that deter you from the book).

Mahler has put together one of the most readable books about late seventies New York in recent memory. The book flows from a variety of topics that New York faced in 1977. The book mostly focuses on one of the most controversial and talented teams of the era, Billy Martin's New York Yankees, but it mends the story of these Yankees with the other important events facing the city during this time. New York faced civil unrest, desperation from its residents and the despair of many of its minorities. The book is highly reccomened to anyone who lived through this period and this comes from a diehard Red Sox fan.

Jonathan Mahler's new book, "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning" is a terrific accomplishment that weaves together many fractured elements which helped to contribute to a year that was quite unlike most other years in New York City. It was, by and large, a depressing time for New York but the enormous boost New Yorkers received by the Yankees' World Series victory that October, coupled with a change in mayors shortly thereafter, began to lift the city out of the doldrums. As one who remembers New York in 1977 very well, Mahler has reminded us of a place which seems light years away from the present. It's a walk down memory lane for some of us.

"The Bronx is Burning" is told in three parts and the least effective part is the first. Necessarily introductory, Mahler's narrative style in Part One never gains much traction. Between the political landscape of the early part of the year and the problematic Yankees, the author doesn't quite bounce back and forth so much as he diarizes. If there is tension to be found in what's to come, it's not found here. Reggie Jackson's ego is certainly a reportable topic but Mahler spends far too much time on him. It's filler that doesn't quite sate. Mahler, however, has plenty of good stuff to come. With Part Two he begins to build a story of intense proportion. From this point on, I couldn't put down the book. He begins by giving us an account, rich in detail, about the first hour of the summer blackout and the hapless Con Edison systems operator who was at the heart of it. Continuing on through the night's ensuing riots, "The Bronx Is Burning" begins to breathe new life. From here the links in the book become clearer. As the events of July, August and September unfold, the city of New York is forced to take a sharper look at itself and there is no better focal point than the upcoming Democratic primary and its characters from central casting. Mahler brilliantly connects the dots at the same time adding an exceptionally good section about the murderer known as the "Son of Sam", who terrorized the city for over a year. The author's final chapters regarding the Yankees' championship are told with clarity and passion.

It's hard to remember that all of these events happened in one calendar year but maybe we were so benumbed by those happenings that we tended to overlook their confluence. Jonathan Mahler has brought them all together in "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning" and has done so in a way that puts that year back in some of our minds and gives a great account to those who were not yet around to experience it.

This book is both an interesting time capsule of 1977, the story of an economic policy that had run its course and the American past time.

The title of this book comes from Howard Cosell's statement during the broadcast of a Yankees game. But it was not the baseball team that was "on fire". Cosell was speaking of a fire in a nearby a neighborhood.

If it were not for our knowing now how the story of the city played out it almost reads as though the new Rome, like the old Rome, was collapsing.

Written with a gripping style Mahler tells the story of a baseball team struggling for success while the city in which it is located is coming apart at the seams.

As Billy Martin is trying his best to whip together the Yankees, and while the famous dance at Studio 54, the Big Apple was rotting from the inside out.

These were the days of the Son of Sam, a blackout and the riots that ensued and an economic crisis gripped New York City (it was only two years before the time this book is set in when the famous headline appeared "Ford to New York: Drop Dead"). It was also a time when Watergate and the national soul searching that followed was still in our collective memories. A time that gave America pause to reflect on its limitations. And so did New York.

The city's passion for baseball makes for an interesting device and analogy to both the chaos and hopes of a city in crisis.

Although the book ends in a somewhat less than satisfying way I enjoyed it and recommend it.