From bestselling author Jonathan Mahler comes a sweeping chronicle of four years in 1980s New
York that would transform the city and leave it more divided than ever. A rollicking real-life
Bonfire of the Vanities featuring the larger-than-life personalities of Donald Trump Spike
Lee Ed Koch Al Sharpton Rudy Giuliani and countless others. 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.
