Reviews of the books mentioned briefly | The New Yorker

New York GodsBy Jonathan Mahler (Random House). This chronicle of New York City covers four “USADailyTrends and turbulent” years in its history, from 1986 to 1989, an era that included… AIDS And cracking epidemics, rolling corruption scandals, rising crime rates, and rising junk bond prices on Wall Street. The book follows activists, artists, politicians, and business tycoons—Larry Kramer, Spike Lee, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump, among others—as they compete to make their mark, creating a legacy that is still felt today. Each chapter covers one year, moving between characters and story lines in a story as sprawling and multi-faceted as the city itself.

You tryWritten by Chloe Caldwell (Grey Wolf). In this brutally frank memoir about trying to conceive without IVF, Caldwell writes: “Supposedly the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results, but isn’t that exactly what trying to conceive and failing?” Caldwell, an essayist and teacher, manages to be funny while dealing with sensitive topics, such as infertility and the discovery that her husband suffered from an addiction to extramarital sex. “I custom “Something was wrong,” she recounts. “I thought maybe there was a blockage in his fallopian tube, and he ended up becoming a sex worker in Geneva.”

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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