Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City

From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation

“A tour de force of sharp-eyed reporting, powerful narrative, and heartbreaking tragedy. . . . Brilliant and spellbinding.”
—Robert B. Reich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Coming Up Short

In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.

Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning—and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters’ strivings and struggles—to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice—reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character’s eyes and then another’s, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life.

At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of our times.

Anand Giridharadas is a writer.

He is the author of "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World", "The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas," and "India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking." A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and he is the publisher of the popular newsletter The Ink.

He has spoken on stages around the world and taught narrative journalism at New York University. He is a regular on-air political analyst for MSNBC.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was raised there, in Paris, France, and in Maryland, and educated at the University of Michigan, Oxford, and Harvard.

His writing has been honored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year award, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture from Harvard, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Priya Parker, and their two children.

“An extraordinarily wide-ranging investigation. . . . The remarkable scope of this book is demonstrated in a series of involving portraits. . . . An exhaustively reported book by a ferociously talented writer.”
—Scott Turow, The New York Times

"Destined to become one of the decade’s defining works of narrative reporting."
—Chicago Tribune

“Whereas some in the media reduced Neely to a trope—the mentally ill homeless man—Man in the Mirror invests his life with complication and nuance. . . . It is a virtue of this book that Giridharadas . . . applies an empathy for New Yorkers who try to thread their way through the divides created by this case.”
—The Atlantic

“The book is a model of a kind of journalism you don’t see much of, journalism that shows compassion for everyone involved.”
—Semafor

“In Man in the Mirror, Anand Giridharadas traces a legal battle that set safety and order for the majority against protection and care for the neediest. He writes with sympathy for both sides, recognizing despair among the advantaged and the powerless. This book’s moral complexity feels especially urgent as polarization threatens to undermine territory far beyond Giridharadas’s central narrative. This is a brave volume, profoundly researched, beautifully written, moving, and deeply felt.”
—Andrew Solomon, New York Times bestselling author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon, a National Book Award Winner and Pulitzer Prize Finalist

“Man in the Mirror is a gripping American tragedy—a profoundly human story of systemic failures, unequal judicial access, and the complexity of mental health care and individual choice. Anand Giridharadas captures how when rugged individualism, neoliberalism, and populism collide, people struggle to see each other until it is too late. Giridharadas is a powerful and compassionate writer of extraordinary conviction. This is a tremendous achievement.”
—Min Jin Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko, a National Book Award Finalist

“Anand Giridharadas has done it again—making us think in new ways about the ever-sharper divisions of modern America. Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of sharp-eyed reporting, powerful narrative, and heartbreaking tragedy. Its cast of characters are riveting, their stories compelling, and the moral impact of what happened to them as inescapable as the tangled, troublesome times in which we now live. Brilliant and spellbinding.”
—Robert B. Reich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Coming Up Short

“Like the very finest works of narrative nonfiction, Man in the Mirror is both riveting and deeply moving. Anand Giridharadas was on the ground from the very first days after the death of Jordan Neely and tirelessly and empathically followed the sprawling cast of characters involved through the verdict and its aftermath. In his deft hands, the tragic collision of an ex-Marine and a mentally ill homeless man on an uptown F train becomes a profound, lyrical meditation on the chasms dividing not only New York but all of America. It's hard to imagine a more timely book, or a more timeless one.”
—Jonathan Mahler, author of The Gods of New York

“Man in the Mirror is a deeply sobering reminder of all that is lost when a nation writes off its most vulnerable citizens as but a threat. A page-turner and a powerful wake-up call.”
—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water and Fear and Fury

“Man in the Mirror is a map: Anand Giridharadas’s panoramic reporting on the death of Jordan Neely charts not only the forces of how systems operate in a city, but how individual people bring us closer to our common humanity—or pull us away from it. You can find so much of what you need to know here—and much more, depending on how brightly you want to shine the light.”
—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

"Man in the Mirror is the kind of humane, deeply reported, morally complex nonfiction that deserves to be called novelistic. It illuminates a world that was always right in front of me but I might not have wanted to see. Now I can’t forget it."
—George Packer, National Book Award-winning author of The Unwinding

“Man in the Mirror is a crisply written and compelling journalistic deep dive—into the internecine politics in which the killing of Jordan Neely was used to advance other agendas, the many social institutions that were unable to help save Neely’s troubled life, and a country at war with itself.”
—Richard Price, author of Lush Life

"Outstanding. . . . This is an indelible meditation on American inequality."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)