Book Review: The Bronx is Burning

ESPN recently debuted its newest original series, The Bronx is Burning, the story of the Yankees World Series-winning 1977 season, adapted from Jonathan Mahler's 2005 book, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. With ESPN's uneven trackrecord when it comes to original entertainment (Playmakers = good, A Season on the Brink = bad), potential viewers might want to go back to the source book, which is lighter on sports, but heavier on story-telling.

On the back jacket, The Bronx proclaims itself a "kaleidoscopic portrait of New York in 1977," and the description seems perfect. The charatcers and plot lines, described in crystalline detail, rotate in and out of focus, as Mahler mesmerizes the reader through sheer information. The storyline that ESPN siezed on, the clash of superstar Reggie Jackson and coach Billy Martin in the Yankees' locker room, recieves only a slight emphasis from Mahler, surrounded by accounts of New York's mayoral race, Rupert Murdoch's newspaper war, disco's rise, the Son of Sam's reign of terror, and the blackout riots of July 13th.

It's all a little too much for The Bronx to qualify as a sports book proper, but that's not entirely a bad thing. Mahler's a good, but not great, sportswriter, relying heavily on his specialty, anecdotal character sketches. He writes of surprise staff ace Ron Guidry:

"Guidry spent the '76-'77 off-season hunting in the duck blinds of rural Louisianna. He reported to camp in the spring of '77 for the first half of a two-year sixty-thousand dollar contract, having not thrown a baseball since the fall. Guidry vainly set about trying to blow wait-high fastballs by every hitter he faced. Martin's patience quickly wore thin. 'Tell me somebody you can get out," he told Guidry, "and I'll let you pitch to him.'"

Games, and to some extent the entire 1977 season, feel more like psychological battles than games, and while the method generallty works, a reader might get disappointed by Mahler's momentary writing, his actual baseball writing. At-bats go by just a little too fast, shorn of baseball's characteristic pitch-to-pitch rhythm, like in this account of a key Jackson home-run against the rival Red Sox:

"[Sox pitcher Bill] Lee hadn't looked this sharp since separating his shoulder, and the Sox were clinging to a 2-1 lead when Reggie came up in the bottom-half of the seventh. Lee left a sinker over the outer half of the plate, and Reggie flattened it, knotting the game at two."

Missing is the count. Missing is the previous batter's outbat. Missing is the rest of the half-inning. Missing is virtually any scene-setting before Jackson's blast.

The book stands as a great achievement, though, because Mahler's skills as a historian and synthesizer more than make-up for his rushed slightly rushed baseball writing. The plot that gets the most page-space aside from the Yankees, the four-way race for Gracie mansion, is, like the sports material, almost entirely character-driven, but, also like the sports material, a fun read. Most impressively for a book with such ambitious scale and varied storylines, with a pace dictated not by a writer's imagination but real events, The Bronx builds a steady momentum. Newspaper headlines, pithy primary source quotes, retrospective writings and interviews, Mahler links one to the next, drawing the reader through the run-away year. When Jackson finally has his career-defining, three-homer World Series game, you can't quite call it a resolution - there was a 1978 after all - but it is a climax, creating the sense that something was achieved that year, if only in the city's collective unconscious.

If you're looking for a great book, read Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. If you're looking for a comprehensive piece of social history, read Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. If you're looking for only a great sports book, you might want to start somewhere. ESPN is, obviously, a sports network, so it'll be interesting to see how, and how much, it condenses Mahler's original material. Hopefully, it'll keep some of the scope that makes Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, a truly entertaining and informative read.

Source:

Mahler, Jonathan. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning. New York: Picador (2005).