Imagine New York City without the activists who fought for it. Wages stuck at the federal minimum. Police stop-and-frisk without public oversight. No public hospital system, no rent control, no free school lunch, no right to shelter. As Nicholas Freudenberg writes at the opening of Fighting for New York: it would be "a less healthy, less just, more polluted, and less safe place to live." The book's central argument is expansive: health is not just a medical issue. It is shaped by wages, housing, food access, policing, incarceration, and climate. Every fight for a more just city is, at its core, a fight for health. And history shows those fights can be won. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the City University of New York School of Public Health.