THE MAYOR

Celebrating a devastated city’s slow comeback from poverty, crime, and corruption.

Alexander’s latest exploration of American life (after The Hospital, 2021, and Glass House, 2017) is a gripping account of the blighted and bankrupt city of Chester, Pennsylvania, and the people who live there. He argues that corporate corruption and unscrupulous local politicians have, for well over a century, ensnared Chesterians in a lethal web of greed and grift, depriving them of employment, good health, and proper educational opportunities. The majority-Black city became a dumping ground for toxic waste, too. In 2025, the local hospital was shuttered; affordable access to the city’s own water is still under dispute. Chester’s decline was not a result of party politics—“Democrats had run Chester, and Republicans had run Chester and Chester was still Chester”—but of a massive failure of morality and vision. Accepted by the Chesterians as one of their own, Alexander writes with affection about his memorable protagonist, the former sewage plant operator Stefan Roots. Elected mayor in 2024, Roots and his allies learned to scale back their ambitions and settle for achievable goals: “progress came one trimmed tree, one paved road, one community trash day at a time.” The book displays the author’s extensive research, his consummate skill at creating dramatic intensity, and his fine ear for authentic dialogue. Its pace slackens a bit in the interspersed detours into community organizing and the frequent, if appropriate, asides on the dangers of capitalism. Chester, according to the author, exemplifies what happens when America has lost “the thread of its original narrative” and yielded to nihilism. Readers may wonder if that narrative, written long ago by wealthy whites for other wealthy whites, ever had much room for the citizens of Chester. Yet the author’s thesis that this city has a message for a national government that has “elevated profit into a religion” remains relevant and entirely persuasive.

A mesmerizing tribute to the transformative power of community.