> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely, Through Cracked Looking Glass - URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/anand-giridharadas-book-review-daniel-penny-jordan-neely/ - Published: 2026-10-21T14:43:01.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-21T14:43:01.000Z - Description: What to make of “Man in the Mirror,” Anand Giridharadas’ impressive but incomplete new book - Author: Brandon del Pozo - Tags: Book Review, Mental Health, Justice We have since lost touch, but my wife and I first met Anand Giridharadas and his wife over dinner in the West Village in 2011\. Newly in command of the NYPD’s 6th Precinct, I had sent him an email about my abiding interest in India. I’d spent time overseas in the department’s Intelligence Division, and some of my most interesting work there involved investigating the horrific terrorist attacks that unfolded in Mumbai in [2006](https://www.britannica.com/event/2006-Mumbai-train-bombings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [2008](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/mumbai-attacks?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Giridharadas had just written “India Calling,” a book that incisively portrayed a huge, quickly developing nation through the eyes of a second-generation immigrant whose parents had left it for greener pastures. We discussed his nascent graduate work in political theory at Harvard, and my slow, dogged progress toward a Ph.D. in philosophy. It turns out he would never complete his degree. Book-writing and punditry would prove too hard to resist, and he turned out to be very good at them. His books have run the gamut from a skeptical examination of corporate philanthropy and a hopeful assessment of democratic coalition building to a detailed portrait of the tragedies that broken systems create. Giridharadas’ latest telling of a personal saga is [“Man in the Mirror,”](https://mcnallyjackson.com/book/9780593802014?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a recounting of the killing of Jordan Neely at the hands of Daniel Penny. Nearly every reader of this journal of New York City policy will remember it well: In May 2023, Penny, a white former United States Marine encountered Neely, a young Black man who was in a deep, menacing mental health crisis on a subway car that left riders feeling threatened. Deciding to subdue him, Penny held Neely in a chokehold minutes after the train arrived at the next station. By the time EMS arrived, Neely had a weak, fading pulse, and soon died. Before his mental illness overtook him, Neely busked in midtown Manhattan as a convincing and congenial Michael Jackson impersonator. The book takes its title and theme from Jackson’s [1988 song](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%5Fin%5Fthe%5FMirror?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about the need for each of us to take responsibility for the society we live in. The killing catalyzed a series of tensions in the city around race, mental illness safety, the subways and more. The book is two tales, told through the stories of these two men. One is about the sprawling, overwhelmed mental health system that relies too much on the police to address people’s deep psychological problems. It sketches how Neely, severely traumatized by violence and neglect his entire life, was effectively beyond the system’s reach. The second is about the trial of Daniel Penny, which serves as a canvas Giridharadas uses to paint portraits of the people and dynamics that led to this one moment: mental health and racial justice activists, family and friends. Central to this play is a Manhattan District Attorney trying to thread a precarious political needle. On one side there was a thirst to hold Penny criminally accountable for an act of violent vigilantism with an acute racial dimension, and on the other were expressions of relief or fatalism by fatigued and frightened New Yorkers who had witnessed a stream of news stories about mentally ill people pushing riders into the path of oncoming subway cars. The book succeeds in the telling of its first tale. Neely’s broken life is related with unsparing detail and candor, and we quickly get the sense that the City’s mental health system simply can’t fulfill its mandate. The volume of people who need help, the sheer size of the city and its subway system, the overwhelmed clinics and courts, the lack of accountability produced haphazardly by both mercy and incompetence, all lead to the same question: why things aren’t even worse than they are for people with serious mental illness — and commuters. Giridharadas’ telling of the story of the trial, however, is simplistic. Penny was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide, and the book’s account [elides many real complexities](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/daniel-penny-jordan-neely-and-all-of-us-in-between/), as though the verdict was unquestionably a clear-cut case of justice denied. Take, for example, nine pages of long-form interview quotes by young Marines from Penny’s old unit at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Preceded by a litany of the things you find on a military installation, from a Wendy’s to a dentist and the fields where Marines drill, the quotes cover a lot of ground that people who have been in the military will find a bit trite: the teamwork, the discipline, the military as a cultural and geographic American melting pot. A few Marines opine on whether they would have instinctively gotten involved with Neely on the subway. Add it up, and it struck me as a series of unprocessed excerpts from a reporter’s notebook more than the deft work of an author synthesizing his interviews into a portrait of the Marine Corps ethos that may have motivated Penny to confront Neely. If the same had been done for Neely — a list of the stores and institutions you find around his hometown of Bayonne, New Jersey, followed by a series of disjointed quotes by its residents — some might recoil at the lack of effort and its implication that the story only needs to check a box in describing the circumstances that formed him. Only someone who has not spent much time on a military base would think it was important to note it had a Wendy’s. It is hard for Giridharadas to hide his frustration with Penny’s trial for criminally negligent homicide, where a well-funded legal team sowed enough doubt about Penny’s [*mens rea*](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens%5Frea?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for the jury to find him not guilty. There was a point when Penny’s lawyers got one of his Marine Corps medals, an award given when his unit took part in a humanitarian operation, admitted as evidence to demonstrate the character of the man who decided to subdue Neely. The prosecutor’s worry, correct in my view, was that the medal was, by definition, a general participation award simply given to everyone in a unit. To Giridharadas, it embodies the question of “Who gets to be granted the assumption of humanity, of being a complex person full of wants and dreams and needs? … Whose hour of greatest vulnerability is viewed through the prism of their illness, and whose hour of violent domination is viewed through the prism of their humanitarianism?” That’s a bit of a reach. My first observation in response is that Penny’s criminal defense was the type of well-done legal work that many wish every defendant had, making it hard to begrudge the people who can avail themselves of it. Another is that while there was no legal need to know Neely’s inner thoughts or his life history, it was precisely the jury’s job, by virtue of the charge the defendant faced, to plumb Penny’s mental world and decide if he had it in him to be criminally negligent. In that way, the trial was never about Neely’s inner character, but it was explicitly about Penny’s. To bristle at the proceedings of a criminal trial because it isn’t a fulsome portrait of anyone involved is to fundamentally misunderstand its purpose; the value in the retelling is the incisive portrayal of its gambits. The question about humanity Giridharadas poses above suggests another point that he tackles at length in the first part of the book, but doesn’t connect to his concerns at trial: that “the assumption of humanity, of being a complex person full of wants and dreams and needs” is precisely what motivates the mental health treatment apparatus that allowed Neely to remain free, rather than in prison, for breaking a woman’s face in a prior incident, and gave him the agency to abscond from the supervised housing offered to him as an alternative to incarceration. The risks this approach bred were then compounded by actors who stopped checking the mentally ill people they encountered for arrest warrants, instead just shuffling them around and trying to connect them to services under the presumption an arrest would be too onerous, or futile. Neely had such a warrant for absconding, but it was never enforced. Indeed, even if Neely’s humanity was not showcased at trial, it had been acknowledged many times by the city’s forgiving approach toward his violent transgressions because they had been motivated by his tragic mental illness. Though the best approach is still a subject of fierce debate among the city’s leadership and activists, it is fair to wonder if a firmer hand would have saved Neely’s life. As far as Penny is concerned, the book does an excellent job of relating how the nation’s right-wing media apparatus was ghoulishly eager to portray him as a hero and a martyr — in my view, these are high bars his actions don’t meet — in its effort to paint Democratic cities as havens for crime and disorder. Their work in doing so raised millions to fund his defense and unleash a PR juggernaut. Given those investments of time and money, Penny’s fate was too on-the-nose even for a Netflix limited series. The acquitted Wisconsin killer Kyle Rittenhouse, who vilely [calls himself](https://www.tiktok.com/@rittenhouse2a/video/7688351907521252638?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the “Kenosha hat trick champion,” called to congratulate Penny, and a Silicon Valley venture capital firm founded by former Democratic donors who now support Trump offered him a job working on its defense portfolio. His defenders might say that, with a normal life course fully foreclosed to him by his fame (or notoriety), Penny had little choice but to embrace the life offered to him. As a result, in many of the ways that matter most to people, for someone who killed a stranger on the subway, he is doing just fine. While there is no doubt who survived the encounter and who did not, whose loved ones are left to grieve, to the American public, Penny will always be a U.S. Marine who choked an unarmed, mentally ill man to death on the subway. Even if it wasn’t ruled a crime, and even if it began as an effort to protect others, it is not the type of thing a person gets a medal for, or that they proudly tell their children about. Penny kept Neely in a chokehold for six minutes, long after Neely stopped struggling, and long after the train arrived at the next station and people were no longer trapped in a subway car with an enraged man. As a Marine, Penny should know what he did was ungallant and ignoble. Some of his peers would consider it dishonorable or excessive; he was in control of a situation, Neely had been rendered helpless and he didn’t show mercy. That should haunt him, despite what the PR machine insists. Giridharadas, who never misses a moment to remind the reader of Neely’s complexities, doesn’t consider how much the killing, trial and aftermath may have flattened Penny as a person. His clash on the subway made Penny useful to people, and that usefulness will now dominate the rest of his life whether he likes it or not. When Penny was hired by that Silicon Valley venture capital firm, he had no experience in that type of work; his academic training had been in architecture. His only discernible online footprint at the firm is [a blog he co-wrote](https://a16z.com/no-man-left-behind-american-technology-ships-with-our-values/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with two others about the future of warfare. Pangram, an [AI-detection tool](https://www.pangram.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), asserts the entire thing is AI-generated. To me, this reads like its own minor tragedy, even for a man who was handed all the trappings of a comfortable life after his trial. It is unclear how much value Penny is bringing to his firm, if meaningful work matters to him and what type of life he would have chosen if he could do it all over. If Penny had the skill or good judgment to let off the pressure earlier, Neely might have lived, and Penny would have gone on to live an anonymous life of his choosing with a short footnote in The New York Post. The encounter would have been the type of tabloid news we read about every day and soon forget. “Man in the Mirror” is an important book, even with its limitations. It will be hard to find a better narrative of the Sisyphean mental health system that failed to correct for the deinstitutionalization of the 1970s. It is a definitive chronicle of one of the pivotal events of the era before Donald Trump's return and Mamdani's election. What it leaves unacknowledged at the personal level is something I learned when I was a police officer who investigated many such conflicts: When two men meet and one kills the other, there may be a victor in the confrontation, but truly, nobody wins.