Belated Book Fair: Erik on the Burning Bronx

Remember the Underbelly Summer Book Fair? Sure you do. We closed up shop a few weeks ago, but here is my friend Erik with a late entry. Give him a break, he's been billing 2,100 hours a year:

For me, there were no summer doldrums, and my reading list didn't get much shortened. But I have spent the past day going through what would have been the best book of the summer, had I cracked it last summer: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning.

An Amazon reviewer describes it as,

"... an excellent book on a year in the life of New York City. The year is 1977 and it was a year marked by incredible turmoil. The city is under a fiscal crisis, there is a blackout that leads to massive looting, the Son of Sam killings and other problems. There is also a mayoral race and the Yankees race towards the World Series. Mr. Mahler perfectly melds all these elements together. He bounces between stories first starting out with 1976 Bicentennial celebration and ending up with the Yankees winning the World Series. He focuses on the struggles of Mayor Abe Beame, Yankees manager Billy Martin and the Yankees new superstar Reggie Jackson as well as Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and the detectives on the Son of Sam case. He weaves these stories together and shows how New York City was on the brink of collapse and how these people and events did battle for the soul of the city."

Why I recommend this book is far from simple. I remember that year, mostly as it was the year my dad and I rooted for the opposing sides in the World Series: he for LA and I for the Yankees, not out of disloyalty, but because I was stick on baseball and had started playing little league for the Yankees. I wore number seven, and as I watched after game two, I could tangibly feel the Dodgers momentum slipping away.

If a kid from Hawaii can stir strong memories in a retelling of events that occurred on the other side of the country, I don't doubt the same resonance in many others. Also, for a kid who later ended up for a time in New York, I feel some affinity for the author, who came to New York from his own LA upbringing. If he can get it, so can we all. In a sense, summer reading should take the flavor of past summers which, in the end, is about the connections - I live in LA now and root for the Dodgers, like my father before me.

To be clear: the book is about far more than baseball. But the game just happens to be my starting frame of reference.

Sorry about responding so late. Then again it's still practically sunny here and the Dodgers are (barely) in contention. Also, given current events, I have reason to ignore the bad news and take time instead to get last summer's reading done.

Comment: You know, I've been meaning to read that one: I remember thumbing a copy at the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village a couple of years back while I was sojourning there--and during the time when Erik and I were enjoying the ambivalent rewards of the high-calorie student feeding-troughs along Third Street. Maybe time to revivify the memories of 1977, and of 2006.