By this time we’ve seen enough of Rahm Emanuel as mayor of Chicago to know how he does business—that is, how he says he’s investing in public education as he guts it, or how he claims to be cleaning up the city’s books as he hands out corporate subsidies and puts public assets on the auction block.
Yet Lydersen, a prolific writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Reader, remains remarkably dispassionate as she chronicles the mayor’s efforts to close schools, fire teachers, bring NATO to town, shutter mental health clinics, and privatize city operations, to name but a few highlights of his first two years in office.
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Fast paced and well researched, her book starts by revisiting his high school days at New Trier West, where Rahm and his younger brother, Ari, beat the crap out of a kid named Alan Goldsher just because they could.
“I’m sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute, my brother being one of them, who will tell you what the ideal plan is,” Emanuel said. “Great, fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal.”
That’s when he utilized his “golden Rolodex” to rake in more than $18 million as an investment banker. Among the deals he helped put together was “the purchase of the home alarm company SecurityLink from SBC Communications, then run by his longtime friend and former White House colleague Bill Daley.”
Lydersen says she sent the mayor’s press office a list of the topics she wanted to discuss, including “the mayor’s relationship with organized labor,” the clinic closings, and the “allocation of TIF dollars and privatization.”
