The Kingdom And The Power – Gay Talese, 1969 ★★★★★

Gray Lady Meets Young Turks 

Journalism is an institution in constant flux. Its truths are relative, its practitioners come and go, its one constant is change. That temporal quality is front and center in this piercing, sardonic look of a moment in time at the most venerable newspaper in America, The New York Times.

The year was 1969. The Times found itself at a crossroads. Younger writers chafed at the strictures of a century-old tradition that prioritized basic information over vividness and flair. Older executives held the line to maintain the paper’s preeminent status, however sedate.

Something had to give. But what?

Regina – Leslie Epstein, 1982 ★

Play It Again

An attitude in search of a story, any story, Regina is a frustrating case of an author too much in love with his main character. He uses her to tug at the possibility for hope amid a landscape of harsh desolation. Even if real hope doesn’t exist anywhere, he concludes, at least there is Regina.

Regina Glassman is a moderately famous Manhattan stage actress who has retreated to a life of magazine writing and raising two sons. That is until she is asked to join the cast of a major revival of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Regina made her name playing the ingenue Nora in an earlier production; she can’t say no to a chance to relive the role.

How young she was when she played teenaged Nora back then! How much more, she knows, can she bring to the part now.

Cop Shot – Mike McAlary, 1990 ★★★

A Helluva Drug

Every decade has its representative criminal activity: bootlegging in the 1920s; draft-dodging in the 1960s; dedicated disruption of service attacks in the 2020s. In the 1980s, crack cocaine was all the rage. Especially in the cities, its casualty rate had the quality of a pandemic.

Early one February morning in 1988, in the Jamaica section of Queens, crack claimed the life of rookie police officer Edward Byrne. He was in a marked squad car, guarding the home of a crack-crime witness when five bullets were fired directly at him. He was dead instantly.

As journalist Mike McAlary describes it in his account of the crime, Cop Shot, it was a murder that jolted a city, awoke a nation to the insidious nature of the crack trade, and triggered a rage-fueled hunger for justice. “This had only become the city’s biggest police investigation since Son of Sam,” he writes.

Blue Blood – Edward Conlon, 2004 ★★★★

To Serve and Protect

A life in the New York Police Department is a kaleidoscope of the crazy, the deadly, and the profound. That’s even more true when you take on a generational view of the experience. Edward Conlon details his own time as well as those he has known among New York’s Finest.

Conlon came to police work seeing it as a unique type of employment, a vocation more than a job. People he grew up knowing, on both sides of his large Irish family, inspired him to think big:

I didn’t want to hear the story as much as I wanted to tell it, and I didn’t want to tell the story as much as I wanted to live it.

Winchell Exclusive – Walter Winchell, 1975 ★½

The Airing of Grievances

Once he ruled the world, or a significant portion of it he helped to create. Near the end, he had fallen so far that even those who followed his path remembered him but faintly, and with a shrug.

Another person might take stock. Walter Winchell took umbrage. In this posthumous memoir, the proudly pugnacious pundit has some bones to pick, and spends a lot more time venting than explaining:

Before I go to hell – which can’t be too far off – I want them all to know that I’ve wearied of the mutual deception. I have forgiven, but I don’t have to forget. I’m not a fighter, I’m a “waiter.” I wait until I catch an ingrate with his fly open, and then I take a picture of it.

Old New York – Edith Wharton, 1924 ★★★★½

Casualties in Crinoline 

Short-story collections can be like concept albums where individual pieces flow together to create a thematic whole. At their best, these collections contain dialogues not only within the stories, but between them.

I have seen it happen with Hemingway’s in our time and James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room. In Old New York I got to see it again, in perhaps its most successful version yet. Here are four novellas that, terrific as they read in isolation, develop when read together a unity of setting and message that transports you to another place and time.

Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? – Jimmy Breslin, 1963 ★½

Who’s On First? Who Cares!

Here’s a thought: A book has to be about something. Find an interesting topic and really delve into it, examine it from different angles, give it a beginning and an ending and build a thesis around it.

Legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin found a way around that and wrote what is hailed by many as one of the best baseball books ever. I don’t even think it’s the best book about the 1962 New York Mets.

The Secret Life Of Walter Winchell – Lyle Stuart, 1953 ★½

Takes One to Know One

What is it like to witness one of history’s most lurid practitioners of below-the-belt gossip-mongering getting served with the same treatment?

Like Walter Winchell, the target of our book, this 1953 hit job is brassy, bitchy, and hard to put down. Once you do, alas, it’s easy to forget.

The Alienist – Caleb Carr, 1994 ★½

Murder and Psychiatry at the Turn of the Century

Welcome to 1896. The art of police investigation means knowing how much to club a suspect until he talks. Moving through Manhattan boulevards requires a keen eye for pools of urine and horse manure. Psychiatrists are so sinister in the public consciousness they are known as “alienists” and regarded with fear and loathing.

It is a bleak and dangerous time, even more so when New York City discovers its own version of London’s Jack the Ripper on the loose.

Winchell – Bob Thomas, 1971 ★★½

The Power of the Fedora

The power of the written word is an amazing thing. It transforms losers into lovers, dreamers into rock stars. Wielded a certain way, it can even morph otherwise ordinary folk into fearsome giants. Such was the case with a failed singer-dancer named Walter Winchell.

While his hoofing croaked onstage in two-a-day vaudeville houses, Winchell honed another act backstage, listening in on the gossip and goings-on of fellow players and posting his observations on the theater bulletin board to be read by all. In the 1920s, he took his gossip-hawking act to newspapers. In short order he became the most-read columnist in America: Feared, loved, hated, enjoyed, but always read.

The Ninth Juror – Giraud Chester, 1970 ★★★

Secrets of a Jury Room

If you have seen 12 Angry Men, you may remember the line: “No jury can declare a man guilty unless it’s sure.” But how practical an approach is that, really? How sure is sure?

Going by that play/movie, “sure” is well-nigh impossible if you can’t be sure a witness isn’t lying for attention or a defense lawyer is up to snuff. If we all followed that pious Henry Fonda formula, prisons would be full of bankers and not much else. The real world offers better examples of justice in action, like this long-forgotten book by a TV executive.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses And The Fall Of New York – Robert A. Caro, 1974 ★★★

Building a Monster

Like platinum, efficiency in government is highly prized but hard to find. Yet it can be overvalued, too; think of Mussolini making the trains run on time. If you think a fascist analogy is out-of-place in reviewing a biography of a parks commissioner, you probably haven’t read Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker.

Target Blue: An Insider's View Of The NYPD – Robert Daley, 1973 ★★★½

Walking the Thin Blue Line

You are the new liberal police commissioner of the biggest, toughest city in America, and want a fresh look for your scandal-ridden department. So you give a local reporter a gun and a badge and tell him he’s now your deputy commissioner. What do you think happens next?