Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul...

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City | Jonathan Mahler | In Search of Heroes

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Ladies and Gentlem...

	Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Jonathan Mahler Picador, 2006 - 376 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Scheduled for release in July 2007 as an ESPN original miniseries, starring John Turturro as Billy Martin, Oliver Platt as George Steinbrenner, and Daniel Sunjata as Reggie Jackson.

A kaleidoscopic portrait of New York City in 1977, The Bronx Is Burning is the story of two epic battles: the fight between Yankee Reggie Jackson and team manager Billy Martin, and the battle between Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch for the city's mayorship. Buried beneath these parallel conflicts--one for the soul of baseball, the other for the soul of the city--was the subtext of race.

Deftly intertwined by journalist Jonathan Mahler, these braided Big Apple narratives reverberate to reveal a year that also saw the opening of Studio 54, the acquisition of the New York Post by Rupert Murdoch, a murderer dubbed the "Son of Sam," the infamous blackout, and the evolution of punk rock. As Koch defeated Cuomo, and as Reggie Jackson rescued a team racked with dissension, 1977 became a year of survival--and also of hope.

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Baseball, Riots and Serial Killers... What's Not to Love?

This is exactly what a journalistic history book should be. Fast, fun, and informative, as the book reviewers would say... Plus, it's about baseball, riots, tabloid journalism, politicians and serial killers. What's not to like? Its kind of hard to remember now, but New York in 1977 was a city on the verge of total and utter collapse. We're talking bankruptcy, massive civil unrest, serial killers. Oh, and Reggie Jackson.

Mahler does an excellent job of bringing all of this together to give a wonderful snapshot of period of New York history that was like no other. If you care about baseball, politics, or New York, this is a great read.

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In Search of Heroes

Jonathan Mahler has written an exceptionally well-crafted book about a single year (1977) in the history of New York City. The fascinating story alternates between the Yankees and mayoral politics. As the ball drops in Time Square to usher in the New Year, New York and the Yankees are far down in the standings, but the situation is about to get much worse.

In 1977, New York City goes bankrupt and nobody in the nation gives a hoot, the Yankees haven't won the World Series in years and everybody outside New York is delighted, the lights go out in the worst blackout in the city's history and the poor loot and burn, Reggie Jackson comes to the Yankees and his teammates yawn, and Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch slug it out to win the honor to run this disaster.

There is an old adage that a sports team eventually takes on the personality of the head coach. Can a city take on the personality of a sports team? Or does a sports team accommodate its home city. These parallel stories told in The Bronx is Burning make you wonder about the relationship between sports and politics and the value of heroes in our society.

The Bronx is Burning is really about leadership, or more specifically, a public's desperate search for leadership. In hindsight, 1977 was the bottom of an ugly cycle. Reggie Jackson, Mr. October, rose to heroic heights to deliver New York City another World Championship and Ed Koch will be remembered as the courageous mayor that started the turnaround of a once great city that still had its best years in front of it.
The Shut Mouth Society
The Shopkeeper

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Gotham Unplugged

"The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics and the Battle for the Soul of a City"
By Jonathan Mahler

I was intrigued by the title of Mahler's book, since it incorporates several of my interests-- politics, sports and journalism but I didn't expect such a good product. It was the Summer of '77: the end of Disco and the beginning of Punk Rock; a pivotal year in politics with the ascendancy of Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch; a monumental ego fight between Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin; and the paranoia of Son of Sam. Then the lights went out, leading to looting and anarchy.
Mahler manages to weave these disparate story lines into a cohesive whole. I was reminded of Tom Wolfe's "Bonfires of the Vanities," which did the same thing for the 'eighties. 1977, Mahler says, was the last year of indiscriminate,unprotected sex before the outbreak of aids, and it saw a devisive election pitting the City's ethnic and economic interests against each other.

Mahler has a good ear for dialogue and a keen eye for detail. His descriptions of the City I grew up in and love are memorable. Of Studio 54 he writes:

"Studio 54 took the escapist ethic of the disco scene to its absurd extreme. An outsize prop of the Man on the Moon shoveling a coke spoon under his nose, shirtless busboys in white satin gym shorts and sequined jockstraps, busty women hanging upside down from trapezes, a fifty-four-hundred square foot dance floor crowded with undulators, balconies crowded with fornicators - this wasn't about avoiding reality as much as it was about obliterating it." (Mahler, P. 168)

I particularly appreciated Mahler's account of the journalistic wars brought on by
Australian Press Lord Rupert Murdock, who took the city by storm and inhaled the New York Post . The Baseball part is a bit too much "Inside Baseball" for me...which may be the reason ESPN optioned the story and made it into a TV Miniseries.
I wish Mahler had spent a bit more time on the Son of Sam story...it's sort of an afterthought to the rest of the book. Here was a pudgy, nondescript postal clerk living in a walk-up efficiency filled with porno, who had the entire city on edge. Kind of like Jack the Ripper turning out to be a mild mannered grocery store clerk.
Mahler brings the style of a magazine writer and the immediacy of a sportswriter to urban history. It's a good read.

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interesting neo-conservative perspective

Cities in America were coming apart in the late 1960s and 1970. Areas previously and still inhabited by working class whites were being burnt to the ground, house by house, block by block. Considering the magnitude of what happened, it is a curiously undocumented period in American history. So this is a brave book, in that it attempts to document some of what happened in this period. However it is written from a neo-Conservative perspective. If you really want to understand why America came apart, I recommend reading an exploding bombshell of a book called "Culture of Critique".

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"Some Martians landed in Central Park today...and were mugged"---Johnny Carson

I liked the ESPN miniseries "The Bronx is Burning" so much I decided to get the book, too. I liked the television series way better. I think the main reason is that the ESPN show, which of course focused on the Yankees '77 season, interspersed the mayoral campaign, the Son of Sam, and the blackout looting throughout the series to really demonstrate how crazy it was in NY in 1977. The book often focuses on topics in chunks.

The looting, for example, is concentrated in Part Two of the book. I understand that makes sense because it took place within a short period of time and didn't occur throughout the year. The Son of Sam, however, isn't mentioned until page 245 and he's caught 25 pages later and then the book shifts to the mayoral campaign. Sometimes, these events seem like isolated stories and it is easy losing sight that these things were taking place in the same year and in the same city--that "the Bronx was burning."

As other reviewers have noted, Mahler includes a lot of background info in his book. Some background is needed, of course, to set the 1977 stage, but how much do readers need to know about the history of the NY Post and Mario Cuomo's work in Corona and Forest Hills in the late '60s and early '70s to get a clearer picture of what was going on in 1977? When he discussed Bushwick's socioeconomic decline in the 1960s to explain why looting took place during the power outage, I lost interest. Strangely, although there is a lot of background information, the book ends abruptly with the Yankees victory celebrations. There is no information on what happened to the principal characters in the book. Thurmon Munson, for example, was killed in a plane crash only two years later. It would have been nice to know how Ed Koch's regime faired. Just some brief updates would have been nice (the miniseries included updates).

On a positive note, I enjoyed reading about Reggie Jackson. I liked Mahler's witty line "in vintage fashion, [Reggie] dedicated [his autobiography] to his biggest fan, God" (pg. 113). Some reviewers did not like the focus on Jackson, but the book is not just about the Yankees, it is about the "battle for a soul of a city," and the Jackson-Billy Martin-George Steinbrenner triangle was one of the big news stories of that year. The description of how the power outage happened was exciting to read, although I could not understand the technological part of it. The final tallies on the blackout lootings was eye-opening (pg. 218).

In summary, for as intriguing a topic as this book covered, I was surprised the book wasn't better. I think if Mahler better connected the events it would have improved the book. I was disappointed in the book, but at least there was an excellent miniseries that came out of it.

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