Title: My Chicago
Description: A twenty-six-year-old widow with no experience in practical politics, Jane Byrne was puzzled when Chicago's autocratic Mayor Richard Daley, Sr., brusquely asked her to stop by his office in early 1964. In the surprising scene that ensued, she gained unusual insight into one of the most powerful men in America and found herself suddenly launched on a new career, one that led in 1979 to her own dramatic election as Chicago's only woman mayor. My Chicago is a warm and frank memoir filled with deftly drawn portraits of the famous and the obscure, the story of a remarkable woman's discovery of the realities of power. It is also the rich chronicle of her abiding love affair with the vigorous and complex city where her immigrant Irish ancestors had dared to start new lives before the Civil War.

Just as she charts the struggles of her forebears in parallel with the growth of Chicago, backlighting their personal tragedies with the city's own disasters of fire and racial conflict, Byrne also intertwines her personal aspirations for political justice and fairness with the developing political consciousness of the city's many different communities. Her career, she makes clear, is part and parcel of the history of Chicago and of her family's place in that history. In her vivid telling, the challenges of the Chicago mayoralty take on meaning for all cities and towns, for all communities. Wryly, she shows how private ambition and ingrown corruption can breed strange political maneuvers; but she also demonstrates that hard work, direct talk, and earned trust can bring about change. A natural storyteller, Byrne shares unforgettable glimpses of her political allies and her rivals, of President Carter and President Reagan, of cowed Mafiosi and stubborn bureaucrats.

Above all, she convincingly brings to life the Byzantine machinations of Mayor Richard Daley, Sr., and his smoothly functioning, seemingly omnipotent political machine. How Byrne defeats that monolith after Daley's death is the heart of the drama of My Chicago. How she accepts and analyzes her own defeat later makes possible her sobering but guardedly optimistic view of the future for political cooperation in America. A mayor who never forgot that she was elected by the people living in neighborhoods like those of her immigrant ancestors, people who believed in the American dream, Jane Byrne has written a revealing autobiography and a hymn to the beautiful, brawling city she loves so well.
Subjects: Biography, Ethnic relations, Mayors, Chicago (ill.), politics and government
Places: Chicago, Chicago (Ill.), Illinois
People: Jane Byrne (1934-)