Anand Giridharadas at The Brattle Theatre

Harvard Book Store welcomes Anand Giridharadas—acclaimed journalist, on-air political analyst for MS NOW, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Persuaders, Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling—for a discussion of his new book Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. He will be joined in conversation by Junot Díaz—professor at MIT and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Tickets include admission for one and one hardcover copy of Man in the Mirror, pre-signed by the author.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

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.

In 2023, New York was already a city under strain, racked by panic about crime, mistrust of police, and a broken system of care for homeless and mentally ill people. Then 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 city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in the subway. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas tells the riveting story of this deadly encounter and its aftermath, revealing through painstaking, on-the-ground reporting the depth of the rage, violence, and division that have defined 2020s America.
Man in the Mirror recounts Neely’s death and Penny’s prosecution through the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters: among them, a lawyer avenging his failed campaign for district attorney; a Michael Jackson impersonator trying to make her mentee’s death matter; a father who leads homeless outreach work even as his son languishes on the street; a city official struggling to enact a serious mental healthcare agenda under a scandal-plagued mayor. In weaving these individual experiences into a vivid, immersive narrative tapestry, Giridharadas delivers human dimension and complexity to a chapter of American history that has been so often served up as divisive clickbait.
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 an age.

Anand Giridharadas is the New York Times bestselling author of The Persuaders, Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. 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 is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MS NOW. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Photo Credit: Philip Montgomery

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and This Is How You Lose Her. A recipient of the Rome Prize and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Díaz is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.