Recurring series

Anand Giridharadas Discusses Man in the Mirror with Tara Westover

BPL Presents welcomes acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, who discusses Man in the Mirror , 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. Giridharadas will be in conversation with Tara Westover. 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. PARTICIPANTS ANAND GIRIDHARADAS is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Persuaders and Winners Take All , as well as 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 Institute 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. Tara Westover is an American historian and memoirist. Her first book, Educated , was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the L.A. Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and the American Booksellers Association voted Educated the Nonfiction Book of the Year. In 2019, Time Magazine named Westover one of the 100 Most Influential People. Westover holds a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 2019 she was the Rosenthal Writer in Residence at Harvard University. In 2023, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden.