The City Is Up for Grabs
How Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Led and Lost a City in Crisis
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発行者による作品情報
"Gregory Pratt had a rare front-row seat to the passions, problems, peculiarities, hopes, disappointments, shenanigans, and pettiness in the drama and farce that was Lori Lightfoot's uneasy tenure on the fifth floor at City Hall. What he delivers on these pages takes us backstage to give us a powerful, incisive portrait of the woman, the details of her mayoralty, and the many players who shared the stage." —Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune reporter and author of A Chicago Tavern
Chicago is a world-class city, but it is also a city in crisis.
Crime is up, schools have repeatedly shut down due to conflict between City Hall and the powerful teachers' union, and COVID-19 only deepened the entrenched poverty, institutional racism, and endless tug of war between the city's haves and have nots.
For four years, the person at the center of this storm was Lori Lightfoot. A groundbreaking figure—the first Black, gay woman to be elected mayor of a major city and only the second female mayor of Chicago—she knew the city was at a critical turning point when she took office in 2019. But the once-in-a-lifetime challenges she ended up facing were beyond anything she or anyone else saw coming.
Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Royal Pratt offers the first comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at the tumultuous single term of Mayor Lightfoot and the chaos that roiled the city and City Hall as she fought to live up to her promises to change the city's culture of corruption and villainy, reform its long-troubled police department, and make Chicago the safest big city in America.
Some of Chicago's problems can be explained by forces greater than the mayor: national polarization, long-standing cultural and racial tensions, our plague years. But some are the result of Lightfoot's poor leadership at City Hall, a story that hasn't been told in full—until now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crime, scandals, a powerful union, and her own abrasive personality did in Chicago's recently deposed mayor, according to this savvy debut analysis. Chicago Tribune reporter Pratt recaps Lori Lightfoot's sudden rise to the mayoralty in 2019 as a political newbie running as a progressive, despite her background as a former federal prosecutor. In his telling, her administration was bedeviled by contradictions: her expansive promises to invest in impoverished minority neighborhoods ran up against her conservative budgetary policies, Illinois governor JB Pritzker's Covid lockdowns clashed with her preference to keep businesses open, and soaring crime and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests provoked her tough-on-crime instincts, which collided with the public's demands for policing reforms. Though Lightfoot was ultimately stymied by the powerful Chicago Teachers Union, which backed Brandon Johnson, the progressive who beat her in 2023, Pratt paints Lightfoot as her own worst enemy: she screamed at the city's aldermen, berated her staff, and conducted herself like a tough-talking but not very intimidating mob boss. ("My dick is bigger than yours and the Italians.... I have the biggest dick in Chicago," Pratt quotes the mayor blustering during a dispute over a Christopher Columbus statue.) The colorful narrative paints a sharp, entertaining panorama of Chicago governance and its evergreen tapestry of corruption and backroom dealing. It's a clear-eyed portrait of Lightfoot and of the city's intractable problems.
