100 books like Tilting at Mills

What would it look like if the federal government launched an ambitious campaign to mobilize community residents to reduce poverty? 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan offers an insider’s account of one such effort, launched in the 1960s as part of the War on Poverty. What he finds is a fundamental disconnect between the ambitions and high-minded theories of reformers in Washington DC, and the hard realities of practice on the ground.

Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding is a cautionary tale and a heartbreaking catalog of missed opportunities, unintended consequences, and wasted resources. I wish someone had handed me this book at the start of my career to help temper my youthful idealism.

Have you wondered why there has been such a dramatic decline in trust in public institutions in recent years?

In The Revolt of the Public, Gurri argues that the rise of digital technology has allowed people to more easily share information and bypass traditional gatekeepers. Gone are the days from my own youth when most people relied on just a few established news sources. People today are more exposed to stories—either real or imagined—of corruption, incompetence, and misinformation from established institutions.

This has contributed to the rise of populism and political extremism, facilitated by social media where people can organize and coordinate their activities. 

Like many New Yorkers, I am fascinated by the history of the city.

The Cost of Good Intentions details the run-up to a crucial turning point for the city: the fiscal crisis of 1975.

Written by a high-ranking city official after the fact, the book is an insightful analysis of how local government, particularly under Mayor John Lindsay, attempted to respond to a range of significant challenges, including the civil right movement, rising crime, and changing economic conditions. 

Despite the best of intentions, the administration’s reach ended up exceeding its grasp, laying the groundwork not only for the fiscal crisis and for an era of declining public trust in government.  

When I was the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation (now the Center for Justice Innovation), I made a habit of sharing interesting essays with the rest of the team.

One of my all-time favorites was Adam Gopnik’s “The Caging of America.” In the essay, Gopnik offers this analysis of how crime was reduced in New York City throughout the 1990s and 2000s: “There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities.”

The idea that small changes can make a big difference has been a bit of a personal crusade for me ever since. 

In A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik expands upon this argument, offering a full-throated defense of liberalism against critics on both the right and the left. 

In this evocative memoir, the first in a series of three and a New York Times 1982 best book of the year, Simon, a travel writer, captures the world of an immigrant child growing up in the Bronx in the 1920s. Their fathers were harsh disciplinarians; mothers knew abortion to be the most effective birth control; and daughters saw poor scores in math crush their dreams. A story of triumph over the odds, of female rebellion, and of the many ways of learning, this memoir evokes a bygone world that also feels very contemporary.

I liked this novel because it is rough, heartfelt, and engaging. This story is unusual in that the protagonist, Chulito, a 16-year-old Puerto Rican high school dropout, lives in the South Bronx and is in love with his childhood friend Carlos, but with the barrio’s rampant, ongoing homophobia, he attempts to play straight. Chulito is recruited by a local dealer to sell drugs, and though he acts the tough guy, his love for Carlos persists, even though he struggles to keep his true desire secret. Everything changes when Carlos comes home for the summer after his first year of college and Chulito’s life breaks free.

Their love for each other rises above the trove of hostile masculinity surrounding them, bringing vibrancy to their lives. Yet the struggles persist, as Chulito needs to negotiate the options available for a queer high school dropout caught between limited choices. I enjoyed Rice-Gonzalez’s vibrant… show more.

Few writers inhabit history, distill it, and convey the feeling of an era with the verve or immediacy of E.L. Doctorow.

In Billy Bathgate, he trains his lens on the 1930s and introduces us to Billy Behan, a fatherless Irish-Jewish kid from the Bronx, who has a chance encounter with New York gangster Dutch Schultz and decides “whatever my life was going to be in this world it would have something to do with Mr. Schultz.”

Add a love triangle, a colorful cast of mobsters, murder, blackmail, a special prosecutor, and you have the propulsive plot and rich characters that power this unforgettable novel.   

I love the main character’s horrible, deep, dark depression. Aaron’s life as a kid in the projects of New York City means he can’t be gay. So many bad things happen to Aaron that he wants to get a procedure to erase parts of his memory.

I love that just as it seems like Aaron’s life, his friends, his romantic life, his mom and brother, all seem to be somewhat in balance, everything goes to shit and his life is worse than he thought. His father, who he thought died of a heart attack, actually killed himself in the bathtub they use every day.

In the first version of the book, the ending is so sad and depressing, the author went back and added a new chapter just to give me some hope for Aaron. The updated ending is amazing.

Redemption is not just about stopping this or quitting that. Whether your problems are chemical or behavioral, those simple changes are a necessary beginning, but they are rarely enough to get the monkey’s teeth out of your neck.

In this novel, Block’s protagonist from 8 Million Ways to Die wrestles with the post-addiction problem of who you are, really, after that thing that has been propping you up is taken away. Redemption isn’t about what happens when you stop digging the hole. It’s about what happens when you climb out of the hole and start becoming.

Tough Jews is a short history of Jewish-American gangsters and their Italian colleagues with whom they made common cause. It is here for the first time that we understand why Arnold Rothstein was the most important gangster in America.  Having introduced "organized" into organized crime, he promised underworld figures the help of the famous attorney William Fallon if they landed in trouble and agreed to look after their families if they got sent up the Hudson (to Sing Sing). I am struck by the fact that Cohen makes his history personal, by means of his own contacts with the people who know the inside story of how the Jewish gangsters thrived—or didn't. He sits down with them; he eats with them; and he gets them to remember how it once was in the days of Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, and Arnold Rothstein.