The City Is Up for Grabs
How Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Led and Lost a City in Crisis

There may be no role more scrutinized than a city mayor. Chicago Tribune journalist Gregory R. Pratt details the rise and fall of Lori Lightfoot, Chicago's mayor from 2019 to 2023. "Hard-charging litigator with a mean-streak" (p.5), a description that seems to stick to Lightfoot's persona clings har......more

I guess it doesn’t really matter who is in charge. Same old same old.......more

It’s fascinating reading a biography of a time you lived through first hand - I lived under Lightfoot, and even I didn’t know the full scale of some of the insanity that Mr. Royal Pratt details here. It’s also fascinating to see a biographer be up front about “hey, I went in liking this person but I......more

While the author is uniquely situated to tell the story of the Lightfoot administration, without direct interviews from Lightfoot or many of those around her, I think this book falls short of its intended goals, often relying on testimony from critics and Twitter over more substantive analysis of Li......more

During LIghtfoot's term I realized I didn't know what a mayor does and couldn't assess if she was doing a decent job despite people complaining about her on Reddit, where people like to complain. This book cleared a lot of those details up for me, as well as general things about the different politi......more