NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“The most efficient American political autobiography for the reason that Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.” ―Charles Kaiser, The Guardian
A mayor’s inspirational tale of a Midwest town that has turn into not anything lower than a blueprint for the way forward for American renewal.
Once defined by means of the Washington Post as “essentially the most fascinating mayor you’ve by no means heard of,” Pete Buttigieg, the thirty seven 12 months vintage mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has now emerged as one of the crucial country’s such a lot visionary politicians. With hovering prose that celebrates a resurgent American Midwest, Shortest Means Home narrates the heroic transformation of a “death town” (Newsweek) into not anything lower than a shining fashion of city reinvention.
Interweaving narratives―that of a tender guy coming of age and a the city regaining its financial energy―Buttigieg recounts rising up in a Rust Belt town, amid decayed manufacturing unit homes and the stable soundtrack of rumbling freight trains passing thru on their lengthy adventure to Chicagoland. Impressed by means of John F. Kennedy’s legacy, Buttigieg first left northern Indiana for purple bricked Harvard after which studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Pupil, earlier than becoming a member of McKinsey, the place he skilled as a expert―changing into, of all issues, knowledgeable in grocery pricing. Then, Buttigieg defied the expectancies that got here along with his pedigree, opting for to go back house to Indiana and responding to without equal problem of methods to revive a as soon as nice business town and lend a hand steer its long run within the 21st century.
Elected at twenty 9 because the country’s youngest mayor, Pete Buttigieg instantly known that “nice towns, or even nice international locations, are constructed thru consideration to the on a regular basis.” As Shortest Means Home recollects, the demanding situations had been daunting―whether or not confronting gun violence, renaming a boulevard in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., or attracting tech firms to a town that had appealed extra to junk bond scavengers than critical traders. None of that is underscored greater than Buttigieg’s audacious marketing campaign to reclaim 1,000 properties, lots of them deserted, in 1,000 days after which, while a sitting mayor, deploying to serve in Afghanistan as a Military officer. But essentially the most non-public problem nonetheless awaited Buttigieg, who got here out in a South Bend Tribune editorial, simply earlier than being reelected with 78 p.c of the vote, after which discovering Chasten Glezman, a center college instructor, who could turn into his spouse for lifestyles.
While Washington reels with scandal, Shortest Means Home, with its swish, frequently funny, language, demanding situations our belief of the standard American baby-kisser. In chronicling as soon as unthinkable tales―that of an Afghanistan veteran who got here out and located love and attractiveness, all whilst in administrative center, and that of a revitalized Rust Belt town now not considered “flyover u . s . a .”―Buttigieg supplies a brand new imaginative and prescient for The us’s shortest Means house.
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