SOURCE: "Chicago's Machine-Minder," Times Literary Supplement, November 12, 1971, p. 1413.

[The following essay gives a British reviewer's opinion of Royko's 'unsympathetic' treatment of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley in Boss.]

The boss in politics is largely an American phenomenon. There have been bosses around the world—Chamberlain in Birmingham, Daferre in Marseilles—but the boss has flourished most against the tightly knit ethnic background of American cities. Richard Joseph Daley, the Democratic mayor of Chicago, is the finest and, perhaps, final flowering of the Irish-American boss, one with Curley of Boston and Murphy in New York.

Mike Royko's portrait is unsympathetic. Few Chicago newspapermen admire Daley, although their editors and publishers, even if they don't love the Boss, are able to get along with him. But, unsympathetic, biased as it is, his book is a marvellously detailed analysis of what makes a boss tick; his strengths and weaknesses.

First, the...