If you have five minutes of downtime this week, I urge you to buy a copy of Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City by my fellow Substack author Anand Giridharadas (who writes The Ink).
It’s about the sickening moment in May 2023 when Daniel Penny, a white 24-year-old former Marine, was riding the F train in New York and Jordan Neely, a black homeless, mentally ill, one-time Michael Jackson impersonator, entered his car, screaming that he was hungry, thirsty, and ready to die. Penny put Neely in a chokehold that lasted several minutes, and Neely died. A manslaughter charge against Penny was dismissed; a jury acquitted him of criminally negligent homicide.
But, as Anand says in our chat, what happened in the courtroom barely mattered in the court of public opinion. The entire country had already sorted itself into pre-assigned lanes (Penny was either a hero or a vigilante; Neely was either a victim or a criminal), “so there’s no need for thinking. Thinking need not apply.”
He wrote this book to make people think.
Much like American Rage, the book I am writing with James Patterson about Luigi Mangione, this was a case that hardened the divisions of our time. (In a twist of ironic timing, Anand tells me that he heard about Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson as he was covering Penny’s trial. Months later I’d be sitting in more or less the same place to cover Mangione’s pre-trial hearings).
In Man in the Mirror, Anand is at pains to humanize everyone involved. He finds the complexity in the story, and the gray shading most people don’t want to consider.
I haven’t finished it yet, but I have to tell you: seldom has a work of nonfiction grabbed me like this one. By the second page I felt I was reading a modern Bonfire of the Vanities. We are instantly inside characters who ring true; we understand and feel them, even when they are very different from us, even when their beliefs are not ours. We also understand the gritty New York they inhabit, a place where compassion chafes against conviction and ambition.
It turns out that Bonfire was Anand’s template, but he inverted it. “Bonfire is pulling everybody down,” he says. In Tom Wolfe’s book “everybody’s a poseur.” Man in the Mirror aims the opposite way: it pulls everybody up, forcing you to understand each person on their own terms instead of mocking them from a safe remove.
Watch our chat to hear the details of his reporting and writing process; the thought he put into its structure and style. And what it’s like to publish a book three weeks after your wife publishes hers!
I hope you enjoy the chat and find this book as gripping as I do.
— Vicky
Thank you Heather Le, Dani Smart, Tom Huntington, Elle Stern, Jeanne Elbe, and many others for tuning into my live video with Anand Giridharadas! Join me for my next live video in the app.
