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A review by hannahstohelit
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler
4.0
I'm always a bit skeptical about these kinds of synthetic nonfiction/history books that try to put together a bunch of smaller, dubiously related things into one larger whole with a connecting thesis. If nothing else, I often come away thinking that each of the multiple different parts deserves its own book and that I'd rather read that one, and that definitely did come across on some of these different topics. Certainly the part about the Son of Sam felt weirdly cursory, as though it was included because "well hey, you can't NOT include a serial killer" but that the author felt the whole thing kind of gauche. But when READING the book... well, that's a big deal, isn't it? It was one of a few places where I felt like I wished I had a bit of a broader viewpoint into what was going on.
I guess the book's thesis is that it's the time when the raucous seventies got so raucous as to launch NYC into the corporate eighties, whether by elevating the increasingly-conservative Ed Koch to City Hall elected by an increasingly-conservative public reacting to crime and city conditions or by seeing the success of Reggie Jackson as a mega-star player as part of the Yankees turnaround. I honestly don't know much about baseball and while I found those bits interesting, they didn't necessarily fit into any bigger picture for me and honestly, I'm only guessing from context clues that that was part of the book's point in fitting it all together. I kind of wonder whether baseball being the author's starting point kind of clouded the issue and kept topics oriented toward that sometimes-opaque thesis- I feel like a book that started with the 1977 mayoral race with the rest of the stuff (perhaps minus baseball) would have been both more focused and more clear-eyed. This kind of felt scattershot.
For all of that- I get that the above complaints are kind of amorphous and don't take away from the fact that the book that DOES exist is well written and an enjoyable read, even if, as with so many synthetic histories like this, it feels in some cases more like three quarters of one book merged onto a third of another.
I guess the book's thesis is that it's the time when the raucous seventies got so raucous as to launch NYC into the corporate eighties, whether by elevating the increasingly-conservative Ed Koch to City Hall elected by an increasingly-conservative public reacting to crime and city conditions or by seeing the success of Reggie Jackson as a mega-star player as part of the Yankees turnaround. I honestly don't know much about baseball and while I found those bits interesting, they didn't necessarily fit into any bigger picture for me and honestly, I'm only guessing from context clues that that was part of the book's point in fitting it all together. I kind of wonder whether baseball being the author's starting point kind of clouded the issue and kept topics oriented toward that sometimes-opaque thesis- I feel like a book that started with the 1977 mayoral race with the rest of the stuff (perhaps minus baseball) would have been both more focused and more clear-eyed. This kind of felt scattershot.
For all of that- I get that the above complaints are kind of amorphous and don't take away from the fact that the book that DOES exist is well written and an enjoyable read, even if, as with so many synthetic histories like this, it feels in some cases more like three quarters of one book merged onto a third of another.