Anand Giridharadas’s latest book, Man in the Mirror, is a sharp left turn from his most recent two books, The Persuaders and Winners Take All. While Giridharadas became widely known for the broad social and class critiques of those two books, he has a long history as a practitioner of shoe-leather journalism.
With Man in the Mirror, Giridharadas returns to those journalistic roots. This book, about the murder of a homeless Black Michael Jackson impersonator named Jordan Neely at the hands of a white ex-Marine named Daniel Penny on a crowded subway car, is the latest in a long tradition of great non-fiction explorations of an American city, like Mike Royko’s Boss or Sam Anderson’s Boom Town.
Based on thousands of hours of interviews with eyewitnesses, policy experts, government officials, and friends and family of both Neely and Penny, Giridharadas builds a collage of New York City in the years 2023 and 2024. He correctly identifies 2024 as an important pivot point in how Americans talk about race and homelessness. The empathy that emerged in civic conversations during the Black Lives Matter protests and the pandemic seemed to run out, and conversations turned instead to sweeps of homeless encampments, increased policing of transit, and imprisonment as a deterrent for people experiencing mental health crises.
Man in the Mirror is not a book full of easy answers, but it is a book that is full of human experiences, detailing the lives touched by mental health crises, violence, and deepening inequality in American cities. It’s a book as big, and as frustrating, as America.