Boss

My wife and I lived in Chicago this summer, and I wanted to educate myself about its past. You can't say you truly know about Chicago if you don't know a thing or two about one of its most powerful and memorable mayors, Richard J. Daley. You can't get a better guide than Mike Royko to tell that fascinating story.

Chicago is where I grew up watching the fascinating interplay between the so-called forces of law and order battle the criminal element. It wasn’t much of a battle unless the law-and-order guys and the crooks found themselves reaching for the same loot. Mike Royko’s book describes very well the interplay. On a personal note, I once worked for one of the Illinois governors who ran as a reform candidate. He ended up going to jail on a fraud scheme.

There’s nothing about the blues or indeed any music at all in this. Mike Royko might well have been a blues fan, but he was primarily one of the best political columnists of the era, working for Chicago’s Daily News, Sun-Times, and Tribune from the Sixties through to the Nineties, and winning a Pulitzer Prize. His forensic account of the corrupt, scandal-prone but invincible party machine run by Mayor Daley, who had just been re-elected for his fifth term in office when the book came out in 1971, is merciless, shocking, and often hilarious. To a young outsider like… show more.