"As a reporter for The New York Times and then The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert has had unparalleled access to the inner workings of the country's most complex and fascinating city. In the profiles assembled here, she talks to politicians and policemen, bureaucrats and radicals, celebrities and demagogues. She follows some on their heady ascent and others as they fall from grace, all the while questioning how power is attained, and then, just as often, squandered."--BOOK JACKET.