It is not enough to call Jonathan Mahler a historian of New York City. He is more like an archaeologist, able to pick up shards of culture and politics and business and various other endeavors and piece them together in ways that suddenly make sense of the times we lived in. In Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, he brought the year 1977 vividly back to life by juxtaposing, among many other things, the New York Yankees, Rupert Murdoch, the Son of Sam killings, a fiscal crisis, and a mayoral race.
Ed Koch won City Hall that year, and his ill-starred last term as mayor serves as the stage for Mahler’s new book, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986–1990. It is a superb narrative, told with vim, and shockingly relevant, not just because Donald Trump is a major figure in it but because the issues in this year’s mayoral race are foreshadowed by what happened decades ago.