The Secret Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the Promise of American Life - Tapa dura

Combining memoir and observation, the author explores the shifting role of the federal government in Americans' pursuit of the good life

me when the cynicism about our government's value is a topic of heated discussion, Thomas Geoghegan vividly redefines the terms of the debate.  Combining memoir and trenchant observation, he uses his own life to explore what it means to be a "national" civil servant and a "local" citizen.
He begins with the sense that a child has of Washington, D.C.--the marble presence of a big central government created by the New Deal. It was in this city that Geoghegan and many others of his generation expected to live their lives as civil servants and lawyers: the national elite, serving the common good, pursuing the promise of American life.
The decline of the "national idea," the rise of the States, and the growing weakness of the central government pushed Geoghegan to the local level in Chicago.  There, as a lawyer, he fought evils of a new kind: tuberculosis among the homeless, the spread of child labor, the use of jails to house the poor--evils t