First Son ? The Biography of Richard M. Daley

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, America - stepped down, leaving behind a city that was utterly transformed, and a complicated legacy we are only beginning to evaluate. In "First Son", Keith Koeneman chronicles the sometimes Shakespearean, sometimes Machiavellian life of an American political legend. Making deft use of unprecedented access to key players in the Daley administration, as well as Chicago's business and cultural leaders, Koeneman draws on more than one 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, postindustrial Midwestern capital into a beautiful, sophisticated global city. 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 in many ways Daley was unable to fully escape the machine politics of his father. 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.