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First Son: The Biography of Richard M. Daley

Amazon.com Price:  $29.91 (as of 03/04/2019 20:01 PST- Details)

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“Mayor Richard M. Daley dropped the bomb at a routine news conference at City Hall on Tuesday. With no prelude or fanfare, Mr. Daley announced that he would not are seeking for re-election when his term expires next year. ‘Simply put, it is time,’ he said.” New York Times, September 7, 2010

With those four words, an era ended. After twenty-two years, the longest-serving and most powerful mayor in the history of Chicago—and, arguably, The usa—stepped down, leaving in the back of a city that was once utterly transformed, and a complicated legacy we are only beginning to evaluate.

In First Son, Keith Koeneman chronicles the every so often Shakespearean, every so often Machiavellian life of an American political legend. Making deft use of unprecedented access to key players in the Daley administration, in addition to Chicago’s business and cultural leaders, Koeneman draws on a couple of hundred interviews to tell an up-close, insider story of political triumph and personal evolution.

With Koeneman as our guide, we follow young Daley from his beginnings as an average Bridgeport kid thought to lack his father’s talent and charisma to his unlikely transformation into an iron-fisted leader. Daley not only escaped the giant shadow of his father but also transformed Chicago from a gritty, post-industrial Midwestern capital into a beautiful, sophisticated global city widely recognized as a model for innovative metropolises all over the world.

But in spite of his many accomplishments, Richard M. Daley’s record is far from flawless. First Son sets the dramatic improvement of certain parts of the city against the persistent realities of crime, financial stress , failing public housing, and dysfunctional schools. And it reveals that even as in many ways Daley broke with the machine politics of his father, he continued to reward loyalty with favors, use the resources of city government to overwhelm opponents, and tolerate political corruption.

A nuanced portrait of a complex man, First Son shows Daley to be sensitive yet tough, impatient yet persistent, a street-smart fighter and detail-driven policy expert who not only ran Chicago, but was Chicago.


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