In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.
Rather than moving on to the outcome of the case, Man in the Mirror diverts. Through intensive interviews with Neely’s relatives and a friend of his, Giridharadas shows how the vortex of poverty dragged Neely’s life down to Hadean depths ... The remarkable scope of this book is demonstrated in a series of involving portraits ... This is an exhaustively reported book by a ferociously talented writer. But again and again, the author’s clear allegiance to Neely undermines the supposedly evenhanded reporting he claims in an author’s note as his goal, especially once he gets to the trial ... as both a prosecutor and a defense lawyer, I can say only that the rulings Giridharadas found so unfair conform to the rules of evidence as I have long understood them.
His writing is most powerful when he traces the threads of tragically entwined lives. Whereas some in the media reduced Neely to a trope—the mentally ill homeless man—Man in the Mirror invests his life with complication and nuance ... Here and there, the author stumbles when inserting liberal punctuation points ... Unfortunately, when Giridharadas moves away from the man who died in the confrontation and the questions that arise from the incident, his analysis grows less subtle ... It is a virtue of this book that Giridharadas, even while seeming to harbor sympathies for the prosecutors, applies an empathy for New Yorkers who try to thread their way through the divides created by this case.
