I get asked about what happened to Lori Lightfoot - a lot. And now I have a book recommendation to go with my analysis as a Chicagoan, community organizer, & district councilor. Gregory Royal Pratt’s debut book, The City Is Up for Grabs, is great at connecting the dots and reminding us of the chaos and disappointment of the Lightfoot administration. How does one go from winning every ward to not even making the run-off? The chaos of the Lightfoot era stands on its on and speaks volumes, so Pratt’s personal remarks are unnecessary at times as they take from the political jigsaw he has putting together for us. This is a good read for aspiring politicians as sometimes you win because someone else lost the election, but reelection is about what you do with that moment.

This makes for an interesting sequel to City So Real, the documentary that had so much hope about it in regards to the Lori Lightfoot administration in Chicago. Her winning the 2019 election was surprising. The fact that she couldn't govern maybe shouldn't have been. She was constantly on the attack and never seemed to build solid relationships on which a functional bureaucracy is based. Lightfoot also seemed quite profane, although probably most politicians are behind closed doors. Running for office and being in office are two distinct skills sets (like interviewing and working).

<i>The City is Up for Grabs</i> is the story of Lori Lightfoot's term as mayor of Chicago. It is less like Mike Royko's <i>Boss</I> and more like Peter Nolan's <i>Campaign!</i> in how it is a sociological slice of Chicago politics as opposed to a rise and fall narrative, at least Chicago politics as of the time it is set (the nature of politics means that there are already changed fortunes).

The book is comprehensive enough to work as a primer on Chicago politics, including much in the way of explanatory asides. But what I loved here was the intensity. Politics in Chicago is an axe fight, and while it is easy to grow inured to that, the author here keeps the text fresh and imparts an almost serialized drama urge to keep finding out what happens next, even though the ending is at the beginning of the book. It is not embellished, and instead feels like a product of an infectious curiosity and consistent sense of surprise. Keeping that up while managing to provide enough information that even someone new to the topic will not get lost is impressive.

And what a story it is. The cliche is to bring in allegories to fictional power struggles, but that really doesn't apply: political fiction doesn't contain so much texting. It is pure fracas, the narrative of the almost constant thoughtless mistakes by Lightfoot and her team, with rare references to good calls, directly called out as good (though not elaborated on). There is no rise; it is all fall.

The story is composed mostly as a series of crises. I can question the fairness of that framing but I cannot question its accuracy. Only one seems purely Lightfoot's doing (Anjanette Young, and even that happened on the prior mayor's tenure), but her decisions almost always make things worse, often in a florid sort of way that feels like a parody of Rahm's (put a pin in that).

It is unfortunate that Lightfoot refused to participate in this book. There is plenty of reporting and documentation, so much so that her absence is usually not noted (thank you FOIA). But there are a handful of events, most strikingly from her pre-mayoral career, where I felt that the absence of her mattered, or points where I wish that I had her later considerations.

The only place the book fails is in its discussion of the George Floyd protests. For being the event that gives rise to the title of the book, the section on the summer of '20 is spare. This is odd particularly because the book so often provides context to the reader in an even-handed manner, even to events (the CTU fight) that are not customarily granted that.

But situation with protests, and the story of how things went down, is a section that I repeatedly re-read, thinking that I was missing something, but instead it seems to be missing both facts and interpretation. The missteps regarding the curfew and the bathos of Lightfoot in the control center are great. But what I am left with is either that the author felt the subject too inflammatory, or that the reader is supposed to infer fault on Lightfoot, most particularly from the pointedly medieval act of raising the drawbridges. If this section needs its own book, then perhaps start with that, the write the Lightfoot book. Or at least do not make it the titular event of the story.

I am also a little weak on the author's conclusion. It feels tacked on, but this feels okay, as history is not about arbitrary stop and starting points. But I feel as though it provides some credence to some of Lightfoot's complaints. So Lightfoot could not stop being a trial lawyer in her methods and demeanor and it destroys her chances...yet this is the City that still talks about an idea of Emmanuel, legendarily profane and abusive, as aspirational?

Of course, the author notes why Emmanuel was different, and I think that one of the books highlights is the source in Emmanuel's camp who might as well be the Oracle at Fucking Delphi for their eerie soothsaying about the Lightfoot term. I do think that an opportunity was missed. Trump, Lightfoot, and Pritzker are all creatures of the same urge, a feature of American-style democracy that's become a bug. Their political trajectories are all different. I feel that the analysis there is a highly necessary thing, and Lightfoot as the multi-car wreck represents a necessary goalpost in the study. I can't fault the book for not being that, but its tepid ending highlights it, and I think does create more questions about gender, race, et cetera and their performance in politics. Which, again, is strange to the extent that the book otherwise on the account here is great in dealing with the highly racial politics of Chicago that get most cynically abused by politicians. The book puts a name to this in ways that I do not usually see in political texts. In fact, one such event of it is what puts the author in the story. So again, I hesitate to complain about the book not being all it might have been, but it is a criticism that arises out of its strength of the same element in other aspects.

I will admit that I dreaded the writing of this review. I too am a person with many options on Chicago politics. Sure, I suppose that makes me like all the other people at the tavern on a Tuesday, but I was unsure of how I would end up managing my own takes, as I feel like that sort of editing exceeds the ordinary purview of a review. But even as I have some different interpretations, this is good. Danny Solis is the only one that nags at me, and that feels a bit of being honored in the breach. And different ways of telling a history are expected, as the story of a City is always up for grabs.

Thank you to Gregory Royal Pratt and Chicago Review Press for the ARC.