Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38537 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Customer Reviews

My kind of book about my kind of town
My kind of book about my kind of town. It sets sport, music & electoral politics in a social context. Mahler's evocative description of debt-ridden, dangerous and dysfunctional 1977 New York City evokes Hogarthian images of hell on earth. It is hard to believe that the Big Apple has come so far in such a short time. Maybe too lengthy, too detailed prose is devoted to the Mayoral election; however, the tales of the Yankees triumph against the odds in baseball's World Series are gripping page-turners - even for a Brit like me who knows nothing about the sport. A great read.

Ladies and gentlemen the bronx is burning
Jonathan Mahler managed to capture the cultural, social and political condition of New York in the 1970s. This is the New York of legend as ethnic groups like the Italians and the Irish were dispersed with grinding poverty taking its place in urban communities. It is the New York of blaxploitation films like Shaft, gritty crime films like The Taking Of Pelham 123 or the plain grit of Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver.

It is the New York of my imagination: the grime and the glitz of David Mancuso's influential parties to the hedonism of Studio 54. What Mahler does is tie in how gay rights, city government irresponsibility, disco, artists, urban blight, the Son of Sam serial killer and the performance of the New York Yankee's formed a cocktail of circumstance that laid the ground for modern New York.

There wouldn't have been loft apartments in Manchester as part of urban regeneration during the 1990s to the present if struggling artists hadn't made them fashionable when they took over the old garment district in New York during the 1970s. Mayor Giuliani's successful policies at tackling crime would not have been possible.

Mahler tells these stories with a passion that carries you along with it, even making the sport of baseball even of interest to me.