The Gods of New York

Mahler narrows his lens to four years, 1986 to 1990, when the Tompkins Square riots, Black Monday, the Central Park jogger case, the AIDS crisis and the last gasp of the crack epidemic collided to remake New York's civic identity. Rather than a single throughline, the book moves between these episodes and the outsized personalities of the era, with the reporting on homelessness standing out as its most forceful section. Where it's more descriptive than analytical, it tends to lay inequality and political dysfunction side by side without fully arguing the connection between them. Still, the density of reporting makes the case that this specific stretch of years, not any single event, is where the modern city's fault lines were set.