Review by Choice Review
Dyja, a writer, considers how New York City's leadership has faced crises over time, from bankruptcy in the mid-1970s to the COVID-19 pandemic. While Manhattan was transformed into "Luxury City," and Brooklyn and Queens were revitalized by 1.5 million immigrants, the real gritty New York disappeared along with old-style city politics and manufacturing jobs. Tax abatements were handed out like candy to realtors intent on building luxury condominiums. Forty years of development led to rapid growth and increased revenue, while the poor were ignored. Policy makers pushed gentrification without concerning themselves with its negative impact on existing communities. In his best chapters, Dyja describes former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's authoritarian style, which resulted in lower taxes, less crime, and cleaner streets, but drove more people into poverty and homelessness. Giuliani also seriously exacerbated racial tensions with his handling of police misconduct. To rebound from COVID-19, Dyja recommends that the city's leaders provide a greater sense of fairness in dealing with all residents, establish nonpartisan governance, reform police, understand that technology is a means (not the end) of achieving growth, and promote the city's unique position as a center of the arts. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels. --Laurence M. Hauptman, emeritus, State University of New York at New Paltz
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Dyja portrays cities with verve. Chicago was his subject in The Third Coast (2013); here he boldly anatomizes New York in a phenomenally intricate and revelatory web of provocative juxtapositions. Identifying four phases--Renaissance, Reconsideration, Reformation, and Reimagination--in New York's evolution as it struggled out of the bankrupt, trashed, and violent 1970s, Dyja avidly illuminates governance, especially policing; race and immigration; Wall Street booms and busts; the gaping income divide; gentrification; art and culture; the crack and AIDS epidemics; 9/11; and the digital revolution. Along the way, he vividly, often caustically, portrays mayors Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Bloomberg (with a swipe at Bill de Blasio), and brings forward many intriguing champions of the public good, such as Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis, who fought smart for clean, safe public spaces. Writing energetically in a jabbing, inflected, bemused, and satirical style that conveys New York's propulsion and contradictions--and spotlighting the likes of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Diana Vreeland and Jay-Z, Tina Brown and Al Sharpton--Dyja encompasses the scope and complexity of the city's ferment. In conclusion and with an eye on the 2020 pandemic, Dyja reflects on how everyday New Yorkers have been repeatedly betrayed, and reminds us that everywhere in our democracy, "Participation creates power." A dynamic, passionately knowledgeable, surprising, and gutsy chronicle of a world-shaping city and humanity itself in all its paradoxical wonder.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Modern Gotham has recovered its glitter, but lost its moral compass and its soul, according to this kaleidoscopic history. Novelist and urban historian Dyja (The Third Coast) surveys New York's 35 years from near bankruptcy in the 1970s through budget cuts and fiscal stabilization under mayor Ed Koch, plummeting crime and rising racial tensions under Rudolph Giuliani, and renewed wealth and visionary swagger under Michael Bloomberg. In each municipal advance, Dyja locates a loss: intensified policing brought harassment of minority communities, big-box stores bankrupted neighborhood shops, Wall Street booms and burgeoning artists' lofts sparked gentrification that drove out the working class, and Disneyfied redevelopment extinguished Times Square's squalid glamour. Dyja's omnivorous curiosity takes in city bureaucracies, investment bankers, neighborhood activists, literati lunching at Elaine's, hip-hop impresarios, and downtown artists. Dyja shapes it all into a cogent narrative studded with pithy insights and vivid profiles. ("Damp and vampiric, Giuliani was miserable on the stump , inexperienced and off-putting with the tentative humanity of a priest in street clothes.") Dyja's exhaustive knowledge of the era, dazzling prose, and all-embracing sympathy--and scorn when it's merited--make for a stimulating study of New York's never-ending upheaval. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, Bankoff Collaborative. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Fiction (Meet John Trow) and nonfiction (The Third Coast) author Dyja offers a detailed chronicle of events from the most recent four decades (1978--2020) of New York City history. Having graduated from Columbia University, and having since lived and worked in New York City for decades, Dyja is highly qualified to create this work on the city he considers to be the greatest in the world, with careful explanation of the city's history of urban renewal. The author is opinionated, but his research is staggeringly thorough, and his interpretation of major events, such as the September 11 attacks, and insight into prominent governmental figures, like Mayors Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Bloomberg; Governors Andrew Cuomo and George Pataki; and even Donald Trump, will resonate with and appeal to most who are even somewhat familiar with the city and its history, and will educate those who are not. VERDICT This engaging book has the potential to become a classic text, thanks to the detailed work and references that have gone into its creation. Recommended for libraries in larger institutions or for others with an interest in New York or urban studies.--Steve Dixon, State Univ. of New York, Delhi
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The fall and rise of today's New York City--for better and worse. It wasn't long ago, writes novelist and historian Dyja, when NYC, or at least parts of it, was held up as "a ruin so apparently complete that the rest of the falling nation could say that at least they weren't there." That was when Jimmy Carter was president, after Gerald Ford had told the city to "drop dead," when South Bronx alone experienced 63,000 arsons in two years and the rest of the city was grim and gritty. Thirty-odd years later, the city had undergone "the most dramatic peacetime transformation of a city since Haussmann rebuilt Paris." The result is a theme park for the conspicuous consumer, a place very different from the "workers' paradise" of public housing, schools, transit, and other public goods promised by Fiorello La Guardia not long after the five boroughs joined. The low that preceded the high was profound; in the 1970s, the city "lost control…not just because of debt, but because it couldn't effectively manage its information," requiring an overhaul of its budgeting and reporting processes. But getting to emerald-city status took more than making the city's finances transparent. It also involved the rise of Rudy Giuliani, who, long before he became Donald Trump's latter-day Roy Cohn, divined that "the Irish, Italians, Catholics, and Jews were…all part of White Western Civilization, which needed no explanation or defense," and used this insight as cause to crack down on non-White populations. Under Michael Bloomberg, money became ascendant. The industrial New York of old became a technological and financial capital par excellence, "a 'Luxury City'…more upset when a Chanel store has its windows broken than when police murder a man." Dyja is no fan of the authoritarians and plutocrats, clearly, but he does not spare more liberal mayors like David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio, who "let the city go adrift." Morally and politically charged, an urgent, readable story of Gotham's fortunes. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
