Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning by Jonathan Mahler

There was a Science Fiction movie that came out around 1981 called “Escape From New York”.  That movie was set in the future, and the premise was that the entire city of New York had recently been converted to a maximum security prison.  The entire city.  Although they never state so in the movie, the implication is that New York was getting so bad over the years, that it probably made more sense to just “give up” then try to rebuild and revamp the dangerously chaotic city.

Fortunately, time has shown us that the legendary five boroughs did, in fact, improve and are in much better shape than they were half a century ago. If you lived in New York City in 1977, however, odds are you weren’t optimistic that such an outcome could have been possible.  What this books sets out to do is tell some of the stories/current events that occupied the front pages of the New York newspapers, and show us just how awfully messy things really were.

Ironically, the fact that the author is tackling so many different narratives of the particular time and place into one book actually ends up doing more harm than good.  This book jumps around from narrative to narrative too jarringly. Our main areas of focus here consists of the New York Yankees World Series baseball team of 1977, the race for Mayor during the same year, the infamous catastrophic 24-hour blackout that occurred during the triple digit heat during August, and the scary “Son of Sam” murders that were occurring right in the middle of all of these events.

The author himself states that he set out to only cover the Yankees tumultuous year for this book, but he ended up branching out and telling these other stories as well.  He really should have stuck with his original intention.  This is where the book is the best. For those who are familiar with the Yankees during this time period know that they were loved by some, hated by most, and the headlines were dominated by Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, and multi-million dollar athlete (there weren’t many of these back then) Reggie Jackson.  This is where the book shines the brightest, and the team of this particular year does warrant its own separate narrative with all of its colorful bickering personalities.

Well, maybe the author didn’t have enough material, so he switches back and forth with the above mentioned events.  Yes, the race for mayor was quite interesting; especially since the city seemed to be such a malodorous mismanaged cesspool, but it simply isn’t as captivating reading about such figures as Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo as it is reading about Thurman Munson and Catfish Hunter.

The other two topics, the blackout and the Son of Sam murders, really feel forcibly interjected here. Especially the latter.  The blackout adds a good touch to the depressing narrative since the true ugly colors of the despondent city is made sadly apparent when the masses hit their breaking point. They managed to use the temporary tragedy to wreck havoc on their home city, and literally tried to burn up the Bronx.  Still, though, this section of the book is kind of “thrown in” to the overall narrative and, at times, we feel like we’re simply watching a very long commercial that’s interrupting our main narrative.  Again, this incident could have warranted its own book, although it would have been a very depressing one.

So I really wish the author could do a “do over” and rewrite this book that only focuses on the 1977 New York Yankees. He could have done so, and still interjected these other three narratives within the book in smaller chunks and given us a much more entertaining story.

The author is a very gifted writer and he really does capture the reader’s attention as he relives the time very well with his prose. I just wished he would have written only one book within this one book instead of four.