Library Journal
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Rivlin, a journalist at the Chicago Reader during the Washington administration, presents a history and commentary on black participation in Chicago politics. Beginning with the irony of Chicago's founder and first resident, a black trapper, he chronicles the conflict between white machine bosses and the growing black community. The details of personality and politics are remarkable and, as such, Rivlin's book is a valuable account of conflicts within the black community and among leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Lu Palmer, and William Dawson, as well as between black and white. This view of Chicago politics is invaluable and a very readable contribution to the literature on the Washington years. It provides a nice counterbalance to the memoirs of Washington's supporters in Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods , edited by Pierre Clavel and Wim Wiewel ( LJ 12/91) and will be of interest to urban specialists and lay readers.-- William L. Waugh Jr., Georgia State Univ., Atlanta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly
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The first black mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, who died in office in ok? 1987, welded a multiracial coalition that replaced the corrupt political machine put in place by ex-mayor Richard Daley during his 21-year tenure. Washington's embattled administration was, in the author's judgment, ``a grand experiment with national ramifications,'' an assessment not entirely borne out by the facts in this engrossing behind-the-scenes account of the mayor's narrow electoral victory in 1983, the racial backlash his rule inspired and the rancorous City Council wars that deadlocked his reforms and almost subverted his program. Rivlin, who covered local politics for the Chicago Reader , blasts the press for stereotyping Washington as ``racially polarizing'' and for insinuating that his coalition was rotten. The book witheringly portrays Jesse Jackson as an ultra-ambitious, cunning opportunist who claimed undue credit for Washington's election. Rivlin's corrective critique provides a much-needed perspective on Chicago's racially divisive politics. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A mostly admiring--though contentious, flatly written, and somewhat overlong--political biography of Harold Washington, mayor of Chicago from 1983-87. Rivlin has covered Chicago politics for the Chicago Reader and The Nation. The first half of Rivlin's account is devoted to the final years of Richard Daley's political machine and the struggle for power that followed between Daley's protégé Jane Byrne and--by Rivlin's account--his inept son, Richard Daley, Jr. The portraits of Byrne and Daley, Jr., are anything but flattering, but Rivlin's harshest words are reserved for Washington's rival Jesse Jackson, who emerges here as egotistical and opportunistic to a fault. When Washington won the Democratic primary for mayor in 1983, Jackson jumped forward and tried to introduce Washington's victory speech; when that failed, he tried to raise Washington's arm with his own as though it had been a joint triumph. Rivlin also gives much space to black nationalist Lu Palmer, and to a Polish city council powerhouse who in Washington's first term held sway over machine- loyal aldermen and prevented Washington from accomplishing much of anything. Washington gets high marks for an almost obsessive devotion to his job, for rising above considerations of race, for providing housing initiatives, and for attempting to lift Chicago government above the Daley legacy of cronyism. But he was not always effective as an administrator, Rivlin shows, and many of his own appointments were questionable. Washington's personal life was a shambles, with a succession of girlfriends, excessive drinking, and the tendency to be late or to miss appointments altogether. White backlash and wars with the city council put him under terrible stress, and he finally fell over at his desk with a coronary just at the point, in the beginning of his second term, when he had consolidated enough power to become truly effective. Perhaps his greatest legacy is that, to a large extent, he broke Daley's machine. Uneven and often, it seems, unfair, but Rivlin's research and intimate knowledge of the principals are impressive.