Anand Giridharadas's "Man in the Mirror" revisits the killing of Jordan Neely with a scope well beyond the subway car where he died. Giridharadas builds outward from Neely and Daniel Penny into a sprawling cast: the Reverend Al Sharpton, working the Neely family's case while insisting he descends from "the James Brown tradition, not the Martin Luther King Jr. tradition"; PR strategist Michelle Watts, orchestrating press coverage in real time; activist Hawk Newsome, laying siege to the DA's office to charge Penny; Neely's uncle Christopher, insisting to reporters, "My nephew was a really fly guy," determined that the world know Neely as more than his diagnoses and death; and Manhattan chief medical examiner Dr. Harris, whose autopsy testimony becomes the book's most devastating set piece. Each is drawn with enough specificity and reporting that they read like protagonists in their own right rather than footnotes to Neely's story.

They are only a sampling; Giridharadas renders his entire cast in sharp, remarkably efficient thumbnails that never lose sight of their humanity.

The reporting is staggering, distilling pages of psychiatric intake records, hospitalizations, and outreach logs into a clear ledger of municipal abandonment—including the night weeks before his death when a shelter placement collapsed over a van driver's protocol dispute and Neely simply walked off.

The book’s strongest message brings the failure of city services into tragic, high relief, most sharply in Giridharadas's description of the autopsy itself: "Municipal love was fickle. It dealt more easily in the acute than in the chronic. It was better at counting the exact number of milliliters of fluid in the stomach than at making sure stomachs were full."

It's a sad, meticulously reported book, and an indelible one. It's less a true-crime account of one chokehold than a portrait of every system that put Neely on that train in the first place. This time the #mustread hashtag is deserved.