I just finished reading Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bronx is Burning by Johnathan Mahler. I was definitely disappointed by this book. I had been looking forward to reading it after seeing pieces of the miniseries on ESPN while roadtripping across the country with my friend Gen. I am not a big baseball fan, but even I found the portions of the series that we caught in our hotel rooms to be gripping entertainment. The splicing together of the Yankees 1977 pennant run with the Son of Sam killings, the blackout, and the bankruptcy of the city was a great concept. ESPN’s use of fantastic stock footage helped bolster the story even more. I find it really sad to say “This book wasn’t as good as a made-for-TV-movie on ESPN,” but that’s exactly what I find myself compelled to utter.

This book was in serious need of heavy duty editing. A major restructuring could have really helped it out. Okay, so the book is about 1977 in New York, but really it’s about the Yankees. I don’t know if Mahler became preoccupied with including the rest of the story while writing it, or if this was something done at the suggestion of the publisher, but most of the material that’s not about the Yankees feels like it was just sorta tacked on. A lot happened in NYC in and around 1977. Between the heavy financial problems, the blackout riots and looting, the rise of the disco scene, the gay bathhouses, the birth of the SoHo art scene, punk music, teacher strikes, the firing of police and the shuttering of firehouse, Rupert Murdoch, and the Son of Sam… well, that’s a lot for one book to cover. Which is why it’s puzzling that Mahler spends the first half of the book just leading up to 1977. The chapters jump between topics, sometimes never to return. Punk music, disco, the club scene, the beginnings of hip hop, the bathhouses, the SoHo art scene, and numerous other topics get only one chapter. The rest of the chapters are dedicated to the mayoral race and to the minutiae of the rise and fall of Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson. Because the chapters jump around by topic, the time line becomes very muddled. This section needed major editing. Once Mahler committed to making the book about the year 1977, he needed to kill some of his babies in the baseball section. The characters of Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin could have been sketched out in a chapter each. Large portions of text describing Billy Martin moving around from team to team could have been eliminated entirely or fit into one paragraph. I also felt like it never truly became clear why the mayoral race was so crucially important to the story that it deserved coverage second only in amount to the story of the Yankees. This was because the book spent a relatively small amount of time on the year 1977 and the results of the mayoral race. After so much energy spent describing the candidates and their campaigns, the book just announces which one wins and then… nothing. So Koch won… then what? What was the effect of Koch on the city? Why was this man so important?

Okay, so the first section was confused. Then the book has a middle section that accounts for about a quarter of the length of the book. This is the section on the blackout. It was a decent recounting of events, but once again, I didn’t feel the follow up to be very satisfactory. There was all this time spent describing the years before 1977, but none describing the years afterwards. You never get a sense of the fallout of all these many historical moments, just a few sentences left in passing.

After the section on the blackout comes a slightly shorter section devoted to the Son of Sam. Why is this section a standalone when everything else is told in alternating chapters? One of the strengths of the miniseries was how it moved between the suspense of the police task force looking for Son of Sam, to the women outside the discos who went dancing despite the climate of fear, to the fans in Yankee stadium, sitting in the midst of the burnt out Bronx. But the book just dismisses Son of Sam in a few chapters, never really showing the effect of his reign of terror on the city. After the Son of Sam has been discussed, the book just moves back the Yankee’s run to the World Series, and the mayoral race. A winner is announced for both those contests, and the book ends. There was no real synthesis of topics. The book promised to link the battle between Reggie and Billy to the events in the city - obscene wealth vs. terrible poverty, the growth of a tabloid empire, the failure of social programs, the death of neighborhoods, racism, and violence - but that thesis was barely ever explained, and definitely never proven. And how did New York get from the poverty of the Seventies to the Gordon Gecko Eighties? I think this was an important point that should have been dealt with instead of endless descriptions of Martin’s arguments with George Steinbrenner. All in all, this book had some good chapters, but if you’re not obsessed with baseball and you already know about the Seventies in New York, there’s no real point in reading it.