The Gods of New York

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Brought to you by Penguin.

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt and reeling city back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets – and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions were boiling over.

Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events – involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters – would widen those divisions into chasms. Ed Koch. Donald Trump. Al Sharpton. The Central Park Five. Larry Kramer. Spike Lee. Rudy Giuliani. Howard Beach. Tawana Brawley. The Preppy Murder. The Tompkins Square Riots. Jimmy Breslin. Ivan Boesky. Do the Right Thing, Wall Street, crack, the AIDS epidemic, Black Monday and, of course, ready to pour gasoline on every fire – the tabloids.

In The Gods of New York, bestselling author Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these outsized characters and of these convulsive, defining years. It’s an exuberant, kaleidoscopic, and deeply immersive portrait of a city in transformation, one whose long-held identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city, drawing in and lifting up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture — a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker — when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems that were intended to protect them? New York was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This book is the story of how that happened.

© Jonathan Mahler 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

An enthralling read
The Guardian
Mahler’s exploration of the rowdy origins of the ruling style of contemporary US politics is engaging, enlightening and discouraging
Spectator
Vivid and compelling
The Telegraph
Mahler will have you hooked from start to finish with this marvellous tome that’s as colourful and fascinating as the city it captures.
The Irish Independent
[A] masterful portrait of the city in the late 1980s…A meticulous, riveting portrait of a city at a fulcrum of its history.
Observer
A propulsive, gorgeously reported account of the forces that re-shaped New York in the late 1980s, The Gods of New York is brilliant historical non-fiction that doubles as a warning about the future. With its clashing crew of sharp-elbowed political players—visionaries, provocateurs, and grifters, and sometimes, all three at once—and its juicy, behind-the-scenes details of the tabloid stories that spiked the period like an EKG chart, The Gods of New York is a rollicking ride with a heartbreaking undercurrent.
Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun
The Gods of New York may be the best non-fiction book ever written about the city. Jonathan Mahler evokes the names of my youth—Bernie Goetz, Tawana Brawley, Ed Koch, Yusuf Hawkins—but he manages to both personalize the New Yorkers of the fateful years 1986-1990 and to fly over the city in a metaphorical helicopter, giving us a clear map as to how the city changed not just itself, but the country to which it is tenuously attached.
Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends
A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history. The Gods of New York offers a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born, and why all of us continue to live with the results, for better and for worse. A must-read.
Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life.
Jonathan Mahler has pulled off a magic trick, evoking the sepia glory of the decade of me in the city of me, while also showing the fatal flaws baked into the revelry. The sunken, lost world of this book died with the corruption disguised as optimism known as the Reagan years, the canary in our civic mineshaft. All this happened both a long time ago and yesterday, undone by the same root causes now sweeping our land, proving that what happens in America, good and bad, happens first in New York. This is a story about the big apple, about the tree that birthed this forbidden fruit, and about the worms hiding inside.
Wright Thompson, bestselling author of The Barn
Jonathan Mahler finds the origins of our own time in the squalor, strife, and sleaze of 1980s New York. Full of pathos and wry humor and replete with a colorful gallery of rogues, winners, losers, dreamers, and killers, The Gods of New York is a triumph of civic humanism. . . . A deeply enviable book.
John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke

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