Pete Buttigieg — the mayor as memoirist

BORN AND RAISED IN SOUTH BEND · MAYOR, 2012–2020

The tie. Pete Buttigieg was born and raised in South Bend and governed it as its thirty-second mayor from 1 January 2012 to 1 January 2020 — the personal and political record stands in Famous People and in Government. This entry is the books'.

Two books. Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future (Liveright, 12 February 2019) is a memoir of the mayoralty written from inside it — the boyhood in South Bend, Harvard and Oxford, the Navy Reserve's Afghanistan deployment of 2014, and the governing doctrine the era produced, the "1,000 houses in 1,000 days" of the vacant-houses campaign among it. The book reached the New York Times bestseller list and, on the record of Indiana Public Media's accounting, sold more than one hundred thousand copies. Trust: America's Best Chance (Liveright, 6 October 2020) followed the presidential campaign — an argument about institutional trust rather than a second memoir, printed here at its size. Two books, both from the W. W. Norton trade imprint Liveright, both written by a sitting or just-departed mayor of this city: the shelf stands where it stands, and the political career it served is told in the government files.

Sources:

1. Penguin Random House and the W. W. Norton catalog — Shortest Way Home (Liveright, 12 February 2019) and Trust: America's Best Chance (Liveright, 6 October 2020), with the books' descriptions.
2. Indiana Public Media — the bestseller standing and the sales figure above one hundred thousand copies for Shortest Way Home.
3. Famous People and Government (this record) — the mayoralty and the campaigns the books argue from.