From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation In 2023, New York was already a city under strain, racked by panic about crime, mistrust of police, and a broken system of care for homeless and mentally ill people. Then the lives of two men--Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the city seeking more than Long Island could offer--collided tragically in the subway. In At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, <Man in the Mirror< is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of an age.

Autorentext

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS is the New York Times bestselling author of The Persuaders, Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MS NOW. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Klappentext

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation

“A tour de force of sharp-eyed reporting, powerful narrative, and heartbreaking tragedy. . . . Brilliant and spellbinding.”
—Robert B. Reich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Coming Up Short**

In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.

Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning—and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters’ strivings and struggles—to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice—reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character’s eyes and then another’s, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life.

At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of our times.

Leseprobe
1

A Great Case

When Tom went to trial, the world fell quiet. The usual noise of his life—the chimes of email, the logistical chatter over heading to Long Island for the weekend or staying in the city, the rhythms of the kids—faded into a hum. Tunnel hearing set in.

A trial swallowed you whole. It didn’t matter if Tom’s client was some civilian rich kid caught doing blow in a Manhattan nightclub or, when Tom was called up by the Reserve, a soldier being court-martialed for banging another guy in the boondocks of Iraq. It was thrilling, and draining. And it was exactly what Tom had yearned for when he was still the kind of pin-striped paper pusher most lawyers lose the will to quit being.

Trial gave Tom the grown-up analogue to the teenage rush he felt the first time he claimed the ocean lifeguard’s chair on Long Beach, commanding the kind of respect on Long Island rarely given to most kids, not even pool lifeguards, and certainly not a barely middle-class, often boatless kid from a stormy home who was just OK in school. Up in that splintery wooden chair then, as down in wood-paneled courtrooms now, you had an audience, and if you were honest, that was part of the draw. But the nobler part was that you knew lives were on the line and in your hands. During trial, the outside world vanished. The courtroom became your world. Sometimes, though, the world followed you in.

Well into middle age now, Tom had effortlessly graduated from ocean lifeguard to country club Republican. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a Mediterranean color, and stood with military-grade posture. His voice was low but gentle in delivery. He had a readily visible sensitivity, always scanning the eyes around him, reading the room, as if to check on how he was doing. In everyday life, he was pleasant and jovial, keeping it light, finding relatable things to discuss with anyone. He had dreams of publishing a novel he had roughly drafted and had been sitting on for years.

Early that May, during a trial, Tom wasn’t closely following the news. But one story did hover on the edge of his awareness. It might have been because the story, while covered everywhere, was a big sensation for the New York Post, the right-leaning, Rupert Murdoch–owned lunch-bucket tabloid that was half guilty pleasure, half professional necessity for Tom. The following snippets give a flavor of the articles that would have been entering Tom’s phone scroll in the three days after the story broke:

shocking video shows nyc subway passenger putting unhinged man in deadly chokehold: . . . The 24-year-old passenger stepped in after the vagrant, identified by sources as Jordan Neely, 30, began going on an aggressive rant on a northbound F train . . . manhattan da alvin bragg investigating chokehold death of homeless man on nyc subway: . . . Outrage grew over the deadly encounter . . . Neely was an occasional street performer known for his impersonation of former pop icon Michael Jackson . . . nyc straphanger who choked man to death could face involuntary manslaughter charge: legal experts: . . . charges would likely depend on how threatened subway riders felt beforehand . . . medical examiner rules jordan neely’s death a homicide after subway choking: . . . cause of death was “compression of neck (chokehold)” . . . The wannabe vigilante, identified as a 24-year-old Marine . . . homeless subway chokehold victim jordan neely became ‘complete mess’ after mom was brutally murdered by stepfather: aunt: . . . strangled to death and then stuffed into a suitcase when he was just 14 . . . not properly treated for his mental illness . . . mayor adams rips aoc for rush to conclude that jordan neely was ‘murdered’: . . . Ocasio-Cortez also accused Adams of being “especially rich” in calling for more care for those in need given that his administration is “trying to cut the very services that could have helped” Neely . . . jordan neely matters—but where were progressives when 27 others were killed on the subway?: . . . just the latest example of a trend we’ve seen for three years: disorder escalates . . . jordan neely tragedy shows the vital need for involuntary commitment: . . . Neely’s many past arrests did not stabilize him . . . nor did whatever contact he may have had w…