Bernie for Burlington

The Rise of the People's Politician

De: Dan Chiasson

Narrado por: Gabriel Vaughan

The early days and inexorable rise of the young Bernie Sanders, the one-of-a-kind visionary who changed American politics forever, told by a son of the People’s Republic of Burlington, Vermont

In this symphonic origin story of an era-defining politician, Dan Chiasson, a Burlington native who had a ringside seat to Bernie Sanders’s development, reconstructs the rise of an American icon. With in-depth reporting and remarkable remembered scenes, Chiasson tracks a faint political signal that traveled from the Vermont communes, hardluck neighborhoods, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the town meetings and ballot boxes of his home state, and finally to Washington, D.C., to transform our national political landscape.

Sanders, insisting on a socialist platform that hasn’t changed to this day, defied a corrupt Democratic machine to find his coalition among Burlington’s often feuding communities: the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose grandparents and great-grandparents—including Chiasson’s own—had worked in the mills; the puppeteers, hippies, and NYC transplants who’d moved to Vermont to find land and authenticity; the anti-nukers, activist nuns, baseball fans, developers, cops, and small businessmen like Ben and Jerry, who became Ben & Jerry’s right there in town. Bernie captivated them all, running on the slogan “Burlington Is Not for Sale” to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, one who got the streets plowed but also boasted a foreign policy and a bullhorn to speak directly to Ronald Reagan.

In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, this people’s epic shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee and one neighborhood door-knock at a time, even as the analog era wanes and a new digital politics appears on the horizon. Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, Bernie for Burlington is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“The more I read of Dan Chiasson’s book, the more moved I was by how absolutely unwavering Bernie’s message has been across the many decades of his career.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, on creating the cover art for Bernie for Burlington

“Story-telling has various eternal wellsprings: history and gossip, the local and the epic, jokes and legends. Bernie for Burlington orchestrates energy from all of the above in a wild variety of stories, voices and characters. At the center, Bernie Sanders of Brooklyn and Burlington is an important and unlikely hero, and Dan Chiasson of Burlington and American poetry is a masterful and unlikely narrator.” —Robert Pinsky

“This is a book we need right now—a big, lovingly-woven, Whitmanesque wickerwork of grievances and glories, home truths and triumphs, about a Brooklyn kid and the city on the shore of Lake Champlain where he shaped his compassionate cause. Read it and you'll never think about local politics the same way again.” —Nicholson Baker

“A fascinating portrait of hard-knocks Burlington, Vermont, and of its ingenious, enterprising, indefatigable socialist mayor, Bernie Sanders, who went from seat-of-the-pants "perennial candidate" to national fame.” —Ian Frazier

“Two down-and-out characters—an unruly perennial fringe candidate and a decaying New England mill town—joined forces at an unpropitious political moment to create a left populism and new urbanism whose revitalizing influence is still growing nationwide. Dan Chiasson relates this Vermont fable with a historian’s rigor, a poet’s eye, and a memoirist’s sharp evocations of time and place. I couldn’t put it down.” —Timothy Noah, staff writer at The New Republic and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It

“Few political books are this well written. . . . Elegant sentences, evocative scene setting, and insightful conclusions about Sanders’s 'consistency' and durable message. . . . An observant, eloquent dual portrait of an uncommon public servant and his adopted home city.” —Kirkus Reviews