![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/4868721_3_articleinline_The_Gods_of_New_York.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nEarly on in The Gods of New York, Jonathan Mahler\u2019s enthralling overview of the city in the second half of the 1980s, he paints a flattering portrait of a zealous, diligent, and innovative district attorney who goes after mobsters, corrupt politicos, and dodgy Wall Street types.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A crusader for justice wearing a suit instead of a cape, this brilliant lawyer went by the name of Rudy Guiliani.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Imagine. Once upon a time, the sad sack ghoulish knave who so debased himself and his reputation, hair dye dripping down his face, Four Seasons Landscaping and all that, was once a serious prospect.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Deadly serious. And, mostly, a force for good trying to improve the lives of his fellow citizens.<\/p>\n
A work of recent history like this benefits and suffers from the fact we know many of the dramatis personae because they remain in the public eye.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And Mahler succinctly sums up the cast list of rogues with the evocative subtitle, \u201cEgotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-90\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n Where you classify the main players, for instance Donald Trump who crops up here in all his technicolour glory, depends on your political viewpoint and own biases.\n <\/p>\n
Dr Anthony Fauci is an obvious one whose status is in the eye of the beholder.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The physician is the butt of so many conspiracy theories around covid that he requires constant armed protection these days.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Back then, he was a pioneering epidemiologist in on the ground floor of the fight to figure out a way to stop young men in the city dying from Aids.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was getting regularly lambasted then too by Larry Kramer, the gay rights campaigner, for not moving fast enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fauci\u2019s defence was simple \u2014 real scientific progress takes time. Later, in a move that sums up what a quality person he is, he ended up becoming Kramer\u2019s GP.<\/p>\n
Much less noble is the story of Reverend Al Sharpton who came to national prominence in that decade because so many New York stories garnered national attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At his best, he was in the vanguard of the fight for social justice. At his worst, he was a charlatan profiting from racial tension, propagating falsehoods that ruined lives, and, somewhere in between, serving as an FBI informant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
To get him to pass on incriminating information about the boxing promoter Don King, the feds first caught him in a sting when he turned up at an apartment of theirs to purchase cocaine.<\/p>\n
As with everybody who looms large in this tale, Mahler doesn\u2019t spare Sharpton, now a respectable cable news host, for his part in that debacle or his shameful role in the Tawana Brawley rape hoax.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This brutal disregard for reputations is what makes his book a compelling portrait of a city convulsed by racial tension, beset by political grifters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At a remove of nearly four decades, the astonishing thing is how little has changed in terms of New York being a place as roiled by the same malevolent forces now as it was then.<\/p>\n
Mahler diligently chronicles a mayoral election eerily similar in tone and tenor to the one that recently played out here.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The eighties edition featured a past-it incumbent trying to hold on to power as a gaggle of chancers sought to manipulate the racial tension, the crime and homelessness statistics to their own political ends. Plus ca change.<\/p>\n
More than one commentator in America has likened this fine work to Tom Wolfe\u2019s Bonfire of the Vanities, the epic novel covering the same era in the city\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Heady praise. It\u2019s not quite that good but it\u2019s a fast-paced, gritty, colourful, and entertaining romp through a fascinating period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Early on in The Gods of New York, Jonathan Mahler\u2019s enthralling overview of the city in the second…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[34216,18,19,17,107767,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-193798","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-books-non-fiction","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-person-jonathan-mahler","13":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115591537459345854","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}