The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986–1990

New York Times Magazine staff writer Mahler (The Challenge) provides an expansive yet fast-paced history of the final chaotic years of New York City’s 1980s. Mahler characterizes the era as one of overlapping crises: Wall Street’s 1987 Black Monday crash, the rise of crack and homelessness, the growing AIDS emergency, and the “widening racial divide and the anger and resentment beneath it,” which reached a boiling point with several vicious murders and beatings of Black men by white mobs and the lightning-rod trial of subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz. Mahler also profiles a media-savvy cadre of high-profile eccentrics who were “perfectly suited for this moment,” among them U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, ACT UP firebrand Larry Kramer, “activist and opportunist” Al Sharpton, and Donald Trump. (He keeps things fresh by highlighting lesser-known incidents as well, like Mayor Ed Koch’s “public spat with a ten-year-old homeless boy.”) Mahler evocatively portrays how the tension peaked in 1989; in particular, the rape of a jogger in Central Park and the arrest of five Black and Hispanic teens, known as the Central Park Five, for the crime serves as metaphor for the city’s fracturing and marks the moment Trump transformed into “the city’s white id” through his infamous pro–death penalty newspaper ads. It’s an astute, propulsive history of the “entrenched” inequality and zany politics that came to dominate the city and the nation. (Aug.)