Boss
"Fortunately, nothing can stop a book whose time has come. Mike Royko, Chicago's most incisive & impertinent journalist since Finley Peter Dunne, has produced such a work. It is an occasion for celebration...It is a stunning portrait of a clod, his resistable rise, & fortuitousness; of that psychic frontier where the man leaves off & the Machine begins. Daley's pomp & presence are a tribute to doggedness, good bookkeeping &, most important, being around."--Studs Terkel, NY Times Book Review, 4/4/71
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2018–2023years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I like the feel of Chicago, but while living there, I couldn't stand the aura of political irresponsibility. And the city is functionally bankrupt, even if they can't declare it as a matter of law.
Nobody should move to a city that sells off its capital to pay for operating expenses. Nobody who lives there should support any incumbent officer that went along with it.
Touting affordability in an artificially restricted, un-enumerated class sounds like starving vampires desperately advertising for new blood. Chicago's nice, but it is surrounded by cities that are more attractive in terms of fiscal stability: Minneapolis/St. Paul, Madison, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Indianapolis. And Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Pittsburgh are all in the same metropolitan aggregate, with similar cultures.
I really want Chicago to be better than it is. I'm not sure that Illinois can make it in the long run without amending the home rule exceptions for Chicago out of its constitution. It gave the Chicago Political Machine (read Boss by Mike Royko, if you haven't already) its own playground and has driven a gigantic wedge between the city and the entire rest of the state.
- I've been on the look-out for that too. Have lined up Mike Royko's "Boss" on Daley in the interim, though the bookshop owner wasn't as fond of Royko's writing style...
