The subtitle of Richard Zacks’s Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York (2012) gives away the result — hard-charging reformer Teddy Roosevelt aims to clean up New York City as a Police Commissioner, but vice wins.
This was a very interesting read, though it was perhaps a bit too detailed in places. It does a great job of illuminating New York’s historic upstate-downstate, and in demonstrating some of the unintended consequences (and creative thinking resulting from) of ill-advised lawmaking.
Read reviews from the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.