Mahler casts light on how New York moved from being one kind of metropolis to quite another and how the often-shocking events of the period continue to reverberate today ... Mahler expertly captures the relentlessness and simultaneity of incident that characterize life in New York. History, in his telling, becomes a mosaic of interlocking tragedies ... Mahler’s storytelling retains a thriller-like pace ... Vivid and immediate ... I wanted more...on Ward, who drastically changed the demography of the NYPD ... But to gripe would be to deny Mahler’s achievement, which is the wholesale reanimation, in compulsively readable prose, of a pivotal chunk of history that turns out to have a lot to say to readers today.
Mahler’s storytelling is most powerful precisely where it digs the deepest. His writing on homelessness is particularly strong ... A deeply political book. It records, in its dramatic leaps and juxtapositions, the coincidence of great fortune and mass marginalization. But Mahler too often avoids inferring any causal link.
