Volume 47, Number 16 · October 19, 2000
The Desert Prince
By James Traub
Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani
by Wayne Barrett, with Adam Fifield
Basic Books, 498 pp., $26.00
Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City
by Andrew Kirtzman
Morrow, 333 pp., $25.00
New Yorkers have traditionally expected their mayor not so much to govern the city as to incarnate it—to radiate to the bland hinterland west of the Hudson the exuberance, quarrelsomeness, wit, and unassimilable ethnicity that make New Yorkers, at least in their own minds, a species unique on the planet. Even such ineffectual mayors as James J. Walker in the Twenties and William O'Dwyer in the Forties have reinforced the impression that New Yorkers live inside the world of Guys and Dolls. The most popular mayor of the century, Fiorello LaGuardia, was an Italian Jewish Protestant, a tyrant and a wag and a shameless ham who read the Sunday funny papers over the radio to the city's children. Closer to our own time, Ed Koch is remembered not so much for anything he did as for the torrential flow of his chatter about city life, as if he had been elected cabdriver-in-chief rather than mayor. The proudly corrupt world of Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine that had driven the city's political life for 150 years, enjoyed a final moment of efflorescence in the Eighties, before its chief practitioners were thrown in the slammer.
Review, 6291 words
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