David Axelrod

“You have to have passion. You have to have honesty in office. You have to love the people.” Those words summed up the outlook, if not always the actions, of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Elected to govern a city roiled by racial and economic crises, Daley adroitly wielded the tools of power in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago politics. Under his rule, Chicago rebuilt a dying downtown, becoming a cultural and tourism mecca punctuated by construction of the iconic Millenium Park. To drive growth, he engineered a massive expansion of O’Hare Airport. To correct a historical injustice, he razed the city’s notorious public housing high rises as part of a sweeping plan to transform the lives of the city’s poorest residents. Yet corruption and graft, City Hall’s role in calamities like the 1995 heat wave, and Daley’s inaction in the face of evidence of police torture, tarnished his many accomplishments. A two-time Daley chief-of-staff, Forrest Claypool draws on his long career in local government to examine the lasting successes, ongoing dramas, and disastrous failures that defined Daley’s twenty-two years in City Hall. Throughout, Claypool uses Daley’s career to illustrate how effectual political leadership relies on an adept and unapologetic use of power--and how wielding that power without challenge inevitably pulls government toward corruption. A warts-and-all account of a pivotal figure in Chicago history, The Daley Show tells the story of how Richard M. Daley became the quintessential big city mayor.

This volume brings together pieces from David Axelrod's previous nine collections along with thirty-two brilliant new poems--the whole a kind of symphonic effort to clarify the unity of consciousness, water, wind, and stone--all life, in fact, and the planet itself. These poems are powerful meditations. To read them is to enter into an act of praise driven by intelligence and an unfailingly accurate ear for what might be called the melody of meaning.

Planning a trip doesn't have to be hard, and taking that trip doesn't have to be stressful. Regardless of work commitments, family obligations, or finances, your travel dreams can become realities. Get Away provides the confidence and step-by-step guidance you need to design a transformative travel experience, perfectly tailored to your preferences. Let expert world traveler David Axelrod equip you with the essential tools, checklists, and mindset to choose your destination with purpose, craft an airtight itinerary, book your flights with finesse, and kick pre-trip anxiety to the airport curb. Learn how to maximize your travel time and savor all the wonders you set out in search of and more. Return home invigorated, with clarity, perspective, and enduring memories.Don't waste any more time planning a trip that doesn't pan out or postponing taking one at all. Get Away is your ultimate ticket to the world. Read it, and any travel experience you desire can be yours.

Planning a trip doesn't have to be hard, and taking that trip doesn't have to be stressful. Regardless of work commitments, family obligations, or finances, your travel dreams can become realities. Get Away provides the confidence and step-by-step guidance you need to design a transformative travel experience, perfectly tailored to your preferences. Let expert world traveler David Axelrod equip you with the essential tools, checklists, and mindset to choose your destination with purpose, craft an airtight itinerary, book your flights with finesse, and kick pre-trip anxiety to the airport curb. Learn how to maximize your travel time and savor all the wonders you set out in search of and more. Return home invigorated, with clarity, perspective, and enduring memories.Don't waste any more time planning a trip that doesn't pan out or postponing taking one at all. Get Away is your ultimate ticket to the world. Read it, and any travel experience you desire can be yours.

David Axelrod writes achingly beautiful poems on the growing shadow of climate collapse. His lamentations address our refusal to turn away from the insatiable desire for consumption and material wealth, asking, "Aren't we the fire front, gnawing through dry scrub?" Yet this collection, as it brings us into the intimacy of earth's memory and its survivors reveals the many ways we might learn to praise the abundant sacredness of the greater-than-human world. Like the prophets of old who cried out in the wilderness, Axelrod offers possible visions of healing for "a future world / where a young aspen grove // yields back all of summer's light into air." -Todd Davis, Native Species

In The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence, David Axelrod recalls a balmy night in May 1970 when he vowed to allow no one and nothing he loves to pass from this life without praise, even if it meant praising the most bewildering losses. In each of these fourteen essays Axelrod delivers on that vow as he ranges across topics as diverse as marriage, Japanese poetry, Craftsman design, Old English riddles, racism, extinction, fatherhood, mountaineering, predatory mega-fauna, street fighting, trains, the Great Depression, and the effects of climate change—accretions of absence that haunt the writer and will likewise haunt readers. The essays in this collection grew from a ten-year period when the author found himself periodically living and working abroad, wondering why foreign landscapes haunted him more than the familiar landscapes of the inland Pacific Northwest he called home. Each place had a long history of habitation, but at home he was blind, unable to see past the surfaces of things. Axelrod examines many aspects of that phenomenon in these pages, framing surface realities and imagining the scale and scope of that surface, but also trying to sense what is absent or changed, and how, despite its absence, the unseen accretes to ever-greater densities and persists as something uncanny. Curious, alert, and keenly observant, these essays probe the boundaries between what is here and what is gone, what is present and what is past, in elegant prose. Readers familiar with Axelrod's poetry will find a new facet of his lyrical gifts, while those encountering his work for the first time will be richly rewarded by the discovery of this Northwest literary talent.

Fate, stillness, travel, will, and the deep bruise of individual history as it becomes political history all shape David Axelrod’s classic book, originally published in 2005. In a language extraordinarily lean and fresh, Axelrod shows what it would be like to be truly alive to the nuance of events, structures, and the declarations of those who are in or out of power. This is an unusual and moving book.

The poems in The Open Hand journey across the upper Rhine and Alps to contemporary West Jerusalem and far northern Europe, asking, "Where does the joy come from?" Whether addressing the accusation of a "libelous chain of causation" in medieval legend, a moment in an alley with a Syrian refugee, foxes in the Tiergarten, or a Paris side street where the disciple of a charismatic rabbi celebrates "the graven acts God forbade," these poems return us always to earthbound pleasures, stepping toward us to say, after many rehearsals, "stay, enjoy.

"A portrait of political campaigning that is more like what we hope than what we fear . . . a stout defense--indeed, the best I have read--of the Obama years." --David Gergen, The New York Times Book Review NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER David Axelrod has always been a believer. Whether as a young journalist investigating city corruption, a campaign consultant guiding underdog candidates against entrenched orthodoxy, or as senior adviser to the president during one of the worst crises in American history, Axelrod held fast to his faith in the power of stories to unite diverse communities and ignite transformative political change. Now this legendary strategist, the mastermind behind Barack Obama's historic election campaigns, shares a wealth of stories from his forty-year journey through the inner workings of American democracy. Believer is the tale of a political life well lived, of a man who never gave up on the deepest promises our country has to offer. The heart of Believer is Axelrod's twenty-year friendship with Barack Obama, a warm partnership that inspired both men even as it propelled each to great heights. Taking a chance on an unlikely candidate for the U.S. Senate, Axelrod ultimately collaborated closely Obama on his political campaigns, and served as the invaluable strategist who contributed to the tremendous victories in 2008 and 2012. Switching careers again, Axelrod served as senior adviser to the president during one of the most challenging periods in national history: working at Obama's side as he battled an economic disaster; navigated America through two wars; and fought to reform health care, the financial sector, and our gridlocked political institutions. In Believer, Axelrod offers a deeper and richer profile of this extraordinary figure--who in just four years vaulted from the Illinois State Senate to the Oval Office--from the perspective of one who was at his side every step of the way. Spanning forty years that include corruption and transformation, turmoil and progress, Believer takes readers behind the closed doors of politics even as it offers a thrilling call to democratic action. Axelrod's Believer is a powerful and inspiring memoir enlivened by the charm and candor of one of the greatest political strategists in recent American history.

David Axelrod's new collection of poems, Folly, is perhaps his most personal, vivid and honest work to date. Taking Desderius Erasmus as his noble guide, Axelrod follows the road of folly, error and ignorance that constitute our common life. Along the way we meet Dostoyevsky while Nordic skiing, get a haircut, watch a divorced woman and her daughter fly kites, hold a crippled bird in our hands, consider the virtue of shovels and the perversity of old chainsaws, cross a river with Basho, and blow up an oven heating bagels.Striking notes of real praise alongside bewilderment, this new collection from the author of What Next Old Knife?, reminds us over and over of our privilege and reverence for this existence and our "dumb luck."

Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night-school courses and displaced "adult learners," from concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and poor economic migrants to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Girona, What Next, Old Knife? is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history--personal and otherwise. Throughout this new collection of poems, David Axelrod struggles with how we learn and unlearn our humanity, imagining the ways in which individuals and whole societies live with and recover from moral catastrophe.The collection ends with a long choral poem, a visionary dialogue between the living and the dead who insist that language can resist nihilism, reclaim hope, and enact future accord.