Books, Arts & Manners: The Realities of Chicago

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago By Mike Royko

Dutton, 215 pp., $5.95 As a highly partisan telling of the political career of Our Mayor, Boss is entertaining, unfair, and very good political biography. Royko can write. His daily newspaper column, dealing almost entirely with Chicago, is probably the best of its kind in America. It is, like this book, often flagrantly dishonest—Royko frequently tilts at straw men of his own construction— scattering fallacies of relevance and ambiguity faster than Capone’s tommy-guns threw lead at cops, gangsters and reformers. Royko knows Chicago, and writes movingly of its people. Unfortunately, inside him is a rationalist liberal, screaming to be let out. By book’s end, that creature has escaped, and the final chapters are marred by ideological ranting. Had not the book been rushed into print to coincide with the Chicago mayoral election, we would have had a better book.

JC

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Jameson G. Campaigne

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Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago By Mike Royko

Dutton, 215 pp., $5.95 As a highly partisan telling of the political career of Our Mayor, Boss is entertaining, unfair, and very good political biography. Royko can write. His daily newspaper column, dealing almost entirely with Chicago, is probably the best of its kind in America. It is, like this book, often flagrantly dishonest—Royko frequently tilts at straw men of his own construction— scattering fallacies of relevance and ambiguity faster than Capone’s tommy-guns threw lead at cops, gangsters and reformers. Royko knows Chicago, and writes movingly of its people. Unfortunately, inside him is a rationalist liberal, screaming to be let out. By book’s end, that creature has escaped, and the final chapters are marred by ideological ranting. Had not the book been rushed into print to coincide with the Chicago mayoral election, we would have had a better book.