"City of Ambition"

City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (Mason B. Williams)

I feel bad giving this book a negative review, but I found that my attention kept drifting while reading it. It's a little difficulty for me to put why that was into words, but it seems to boil down to the book's main theme getting quite muddled. The opening material, sketches of FDR and La Guardia, is pretty interesting, and I enjoyed the book during this part, but when the author starts running through a detailed history of the politics of New York state in the interwar years, it's just not very gripping. I would suggest the author either needs to take a higher level overview of this material or dive in even deeper and really fill out the history; as it is, the level of detail has the reader see a lot of characters come and go without making much of an impact, and it turns into kind of a muddle. It also stirs the dreaded "Why am I reading this" feeling - I can't help but feel that a lot of the pages in the book could be condensed down to "La Guardia was in the political wilderness for a few years" without following the fruitless narrative thread about what the ultimately meaningless mayors and governors of New York were doing at the time.
For all that, though, I don't think this is really a bad book - it's just one I didn't personally enjoy. It's a bit tough to recommend; if your local library has it, I'd try the first hundred pages (I made it to 125).

Grade: :/