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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/27\/books\/review\/man-in-the-mirror-anand-giridharadas.html?emc=edit_nn_20260929&nl=the-morning&segment_id=227235",
    "parsed_content": "AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTNonfictionA Ferociously Talented Writer on the Subway Death That Divided New York\u201cMan in the Mirror,\u201d by Anand Giridharadas, is a searching investigation into the 2023 death of Jordan Neely and the trial of the man who held him in a chokehold.Share full articleDaniel Penny at his trial for second-degree manslaughter in the death of Jordan Neely, in New York in November 2024. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesBy Scott TurowScott Turow, a former assistant U.S. attorney and criminal defense lawyer, is also the author of 14 works of fiction, including \u201cPresumed Innocent\u201d and, most recently, \u201cPresumed Guilty.\u201dSept. 27, 2026Buy Book \u25beAmazonApple BooksBarnes & NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshop.orgWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google MAN IN THE MIRROR: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, by Anand GiridharadasAlthough \u201cMan in the Mirror,\u201d the new book by the journalist Anand Giridharadas, is subtitled \u201cHope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City,\u201d it is in some ways an only-in-New-York story. Varied, dense and frenetic, the city is sui generis, perhaps the single one in the United States where an utterly normal existence is possible without knowing how to operate the machine that is central to American life elsewhere, namely, the automobile.Instead, public transportation is the city\u2019s lifeline and frequent preoccupation. This book \u2014 often brilliant, occasionally frustrating \u2014 is an extraordinarily wide-ranging investigation of the circumstances underlying a lethal incident that occurred on a northbound F train on May 1, 2023: the death of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless man, after a fellow passenger put him in a chokehold in an apparent attempt to subdue him when he began screaming. The passenger was later identified as Daniel Penny, a part-time surfer and architecture student who had moved to the East Village after leaving the Marines.Man in the Mirror Save to your reading list:Want to readHave readNeely was Black and Penny was white, and reaction to the case soon divided emphatically along racial fault lines. In the Black community, Neely\u2019s death was an excruciating reminder of the earlier choking deaths of unarmed Black men, like George Floyd, or Eric Garner, who had died on Staten Island in 2014 after being placed in a prohibited chokehold by a police officer who was never charged with a crime.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTA chorus of Black leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, who eulogized Neely, demanded Penny\u2019s prosecution. Demonstrators camped outside the office of the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and a Los Angeles-based P.R. adviser pushed humanizing stories about Neely onto national television. On May 11, Bragg\u2019s office charged Penny with second-degree manslaughter.In response, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and soon-to-be presidential candidate, linked to a fund-raising site on his social media account that ultimately raised over $3 million for Penny\u2019s defense from more than 66,000 donors.The battle was set.Rather than moving on to the outcome of the case, \u201cMan in the Mirror\u201d diverts. Through intensive interviews with Neely\u2019s relatives and a friend of his, Giridharadas shows how the vortex of poverty dragged Neely\u2019s life down to Hadean depths. In 2007, when he was 14, his adoring mother, Christie, who moved in and out of shelters with her son, was killed by her boyfriend, most likely by way of \u2014 incredibly \u2014 a chokehold. The boyfriend then dumped her body, hidden in a duffel bag, beside a Bronx highway. At the ensuing homicide trial, the boyfriend represented himself, forcing Neely, who testified, into a ghoulish confrontation with his mother\u2019s killer.A skilled Michael Jackson imitator, Neely had made a living busking in his teens, but eventually his life cascaded downward. With his father, in Neely\u2019s description, \u201clargely absent from his life,\u201d he was soon living on the street, plagued by the familiar devils of homelessness, drug use and mental illness, in his case schizophrenia.ImageGiridharadas\u2019s title is drawn from a Michael Jackson lyric as quoted at a news conference by the Neely family\u2019s lawyers: \u201cI\u2019m looking at the man in the mirror and I\u2019m asking him to change his ways.\u201d The change the lawyers and \u2014 seemingly \u2014 the author ask of us is in our treatment of the homeless and the mentally ill.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe remarkable scope of this book is demonstrated in a series of involving portraits, including of unhoused New Yorkers, whose meager possessions are routinely swept away in police raids but who nevertheless reappear on the same sidewalks hours later; of touchingly dedicated outreach workers who try to lead the homeless to safety; and of public health figures butting heads over policy. Startlingly, a problem that began when thousands of mental health patients were released onto our streets during the mid-20th-century push for \u201cdeinstitutionalization\u201d now finds many advocates for the unhoused, including Neely\u2019s lawyers, arguing for the involuntary commitment of people like him.After nearly 300 pages, the book arrives at the point promised from the beginning: Daniel Penny\u2019s trial. Giridharadas\u2019s empathy for Neely is, understandably, intense. In describing the painstaking autopsy conducted by the city after Neely\u2019s death, he writes, \u201cHere was a body that had been variously neglected, hounded, tossed about and given the runaround by the City of New York for most of its life.\u201d Where, he goes on, was such care for Neely \u201cwhen the systems of schooling and foster care and shelters and mental health and prisons were being designed and funded?\u201dImageA protest on behalf of Jordan Neely in New York City on May 5, 2023.Credit...Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesThis is an exhaustively reported book by a ferociously talented writer. But again and again, the author\u2019s clear allegiance to Neely undermines the supposedly evenhanded reporting he claims in an author\u2019s note as his goal, especially once he gets to the trial.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTBy this point, Giridharadas has relayed without comment more than a dozen times the description of Neely\u2019s death by his supporters as \u201cmurder.\u201d I was stunned, therefore, to read the prosecutor\u2019s first words to the jury: \u201cThe defendant\u2019s intent, it not only wasn\u2019t to kill. \u2026 It was an intent to protect people on the subway car from a person that was perceived to be a threat. \u2026 This is even a laudable intent, to jump in when most people wouldn\u2019t.\u201dEarlier in the book, Giridharadas writes that \u201cbefore Daniel Penny\u2019s arm went around Neely\u2019s neck, Jordan had been trying to say something to whoever would listen on the F train\u201d about being trapped between jail and an experimental treatment he\u2019d rejected. This, though, was hardly what people in the subway car heard. As Giridharadas relates in his account of the trial: \u201cOne bystander after another on that F train was brought in to speak of the fear and dread and sense of defenselessness they had felt\u201d when Neely entered the car and began an extraordinary tirade, screaming, according to one witness, \u201cI don\u2019t care if I die, I don\u2019t care if you die. Kill me. Lock me up. I don\u2019t care if I go to jail for life.\u201dTwo women, one white, one Black, both longtime riders of the subway, emphasized the frightening nature of his behavior. \u201cI was fearful, truly, that was the moment I was going to die,\u201d the first said. The second was more succinct: \u201cI was scared shitless.\u201dHaving conceded that Penny was lawfully justified in restraining Neely, the prosecution\u2019s case came down to maintaining that Penny had held the chokehold too long, because of \u201cthe defendant\u2019s belief that Mr. Neely did not deserve even the minimum modicum of humanity.\u201d This argument did not convince the jury.For one thing, two other riders helped Penny to restrain Neely as he continued to struggle. Giridharadas never states how long it took the police to arrive after the first passenger called 911, but the defense made much of the officers\u2019 delayed appearance on the scene as emblematic of a broken system that failed both the other commuters and Neely himself. By the time the officers arrived, Penny and the others had released Neely \u2014 his body had gone limp \u2014 but one officer still felt his pulse. However, the officers were not equipped with resuscitation masks and refused to administer mouth to mouth, for fear of contagion.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTGiridharadas questions why the judge excluded evidence about Neely\u2019s background apart from records of his mental health while allowing Penny to introduce evidence of his compassionate character, including a Marine Corps medal for humanitarian service. Giridharadas laments: \u201cEven in a case about whether one man deprived another of humanity, it was possible that the aggressor would be humanized and the victim dehumanized, such that the trial itself would replicate the very act it presumed to judge.\u201dDespite the prosecution\u2019s efforts to make the trial turn on this conceit, a criminal trial is not a contest about the relative humanity of anyone. Its aim is solely to determine whether the prosecution has proved the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Having spent more than 40 years in criminal courtrooms, as both a prosecutor and a defense lawyer, I can say only that the rulings Giridharadas found so unfair conform to the rules of evidence as I have long understood them.Indeed, the one person in the vast cast of this complex drama for whom Giridharadas\u2019s sympathies are notably limited is Daniel Penny. In the moments after his acquittal, Giridharadas observes that Penny \u201cappeared to be in a place of relief more than remorse\u201d for Neely. Lost on Giridharadas is the ordeal Penny had endured, having spent a year and a half under the stigma of a homicide charge and the threat of a prison sentence for a crime of which 12 fellow citizens had just pronounced him not guilty.After Penny\u2019s acquittal, he stood outside a Manhattan bar smoking. \u201cAlmost to a person,\u201d Giridharadas writes, passers-by \u201cstopped and shook his hand and thanked him.\u201d This near-uniform response from an ad hoc cross section of Manhattanites made me \u2014 but not apparently Giridharadas \u2014 wonder if anyone in the D.A.\u2019s office had ever really expected to convict Penny. Did the prosecutors believe they could convince beyond a reasonable doubt all 12 members of a jury drawn at random from the ranks of people just like those who had walked by?MAN IN THE MIRROR: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City | By Anand Giridharadas | Knopf | 464 pp. | $35AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
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