Description
In 1987, the city of Chicago hired a former radical college chaplain to clean up rampant corruption on the waterfront. R. J. Nelson thought he was once used to the darker side of the law—he had been followed by federal agents and wiretapped as a result of his antiwar stances in the sixties—but nothing could prepare him for the wretched bog that constituted the world of a Harbor Boss.
Director of Harbors and Marine Products and services was once a position so mired in corruption that its previous four directors ended up in federal prison. Nelson inherited angry constituents, prying journalists, shell-shocked employees, and a tobacco-stained office still bearing a busted door that had been smashed in by the FBI. Undeterred, Nelson made it his personal mission to change into a “pneumacrat,” a public servant who, for the common good, all the time follows the spirit—if not all the time the letter—of the law.
Dirty Waters is a wry, no-holds-barred memoir of Nelson’s time controlling one of the crucial city’s most beautiful spots at the same time as facing some of its ugliest traditions. A guide like no other, Nelson takes us through Chicago’s beloved “blue spaces” and deep into the city’s political morass. He reveals the different moralities underlining three mayoral administrations, from Harold Washington to Richard M. Daley, and navigates us through the gritty mechanisms of the Chicago machine. He also deciphers the occasionally insular world of boaters and their fraught relationship with their land-based neighbors.
In the long run, Dirty Waters is a tale of morality, of what it takes to be a force for good on this planet and what struggles come from trying to stay ethically afloat in a sea of corruption.
Director of Harbors and Marine Products and services was once a position so mired in corruption that its previous four directors ended up in federal prison. Nelson inherited angry constituents, prying journalists, shell-shocked employees, and a tobacco-stained office still bearing a busted door that had been smashed in by the FBI. Undeterred, Nelson made it his personal mission to change into a “pneumacrat,” a public servant who, for the common good, all the time follows the spirit—if not all the time the letter—of the law.
Dirty Waters is a wry, no-holds-barred memoir of Nelson’s time controlling one of the crucial city’s most beautiful spots at the same time as facing some of its ugliest traditions. A guide like no other, Nelson takes us through Chicago’s beloved “blue spaces” and deep into the city’s political morass. He reveals the different moralities underlining three mayoral administrations, from Harold Washington to Richard M. Daley, and navigates us through the gritty mechanisms of the Chicago machine. He also deciphers the occasionally insular world of boaters and their fraught relationship with their land-based neighbors.
In the long run, Dirty Waters is a tale of morality, of what it takes to be a force for good on this planet and what struggles come from trying to stay ethically afloat in a sea of corruption.
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