This book is about the city of New York in the 60s and 70s: a seething maelstrom of demographic change, bigotry, corruption, and the rise of the black power movement.

English ties this account together with a focus on three individuals: a militant black activist radicalised in prison, a corrupt cop, and a young black man subjected to monstrous injustice by a brutal, bigoted, and corrupt legal system. Through these lenses, he exposes the bigotry, brutality and corruption of the NYPD, the bias of a white courts system when trying black defendants, and the evolution of the civil rights movement from King's non-violence, to the more strident position of Malcolm X, and then to the armed insurrection of the Black Panthers and their violent battle with law enforcement.

At the end of the book, English notes that all of the social conditions that gave rise to the violence of the Savage City are still there, still unresolved, and continuing to deteriorate. This is a hair-raising story, and there's no reason why it couldn't happen again. ( )

The history presented in this book is important and fascinating. I especially like the author’s take on telling it: three perspectives – one a corrupt cop, one a black militant, and one an innocent bystander caught up in the horror. It’s an effective and refreshing way to explore this period of history.

My problems with this book are more-or-less the same as I have with many history books written for popular consumption: the prose is overly hyperbolic; the attempt to make it read like a novel is occasionally ham-handed and doesn’t serve the history as well as it should; the frequency with which the author puts thoughts into the characters heads is somewhat too liberal.

The single biggest complaint I have about this book is the ending. The end felt very abrupt, as though the author couldn’t figure out a good place to stop and just cut it off. The book begins with the onset of George Whitmore's legal odyssey, so it in that sense it works to end with the dismissal of his final lingering charge. But the epilogue makes it clear that this isn’t the end of George’s story, and 1973 certainly wasn’t anything close to the end of the troubles that ransacked this period of New York’s history, which left me feeling like the book ended before the story was actually done, without sufficient closure for the other threads of it. There’s still so much about all of this that needs to be talked about. Also, in the second half of the book, George Whitmore’s story largely recedes to become the least present and compelling of the three intertwined narratives, and so – while ending with his story is structurally appropriate – narratively, it feels arbitrary and somewhat irrelevant.

Overall, the book is very good. Good enough, in fact, that I wasn’t terribly bothered by the usual pop-history stylistic quibbles I have, and I will recommend this book to people. But the ending left me very disappointed, indeed, as though I was short-changed. ( )

True-crime maven English captures New York's decade-long slide into political violence, corruption, and chaos during the years 1963–1973. The topic matter is in my wheelhouse, and English has shaped an astounding amount of research into a wonderfully gritty and streetwise narrative. Unfortunately, the effect is marred by abundantly clichéd writing: news "spreads like wildfire," "insult is added to injury," etc. Famed Harper editor Cal Morgan apparently asleep at the switch. ( )

Interesting tale of lost history ( )