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Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People's Politician
The story of Bernie Sanders's quixotic but inexorable rise is told by a son of Burlington on a broad and vivid canvas, depicting the shaping of a people's politics, as he tracks a political signal that traveled from the hard-luck neighborhoods, general stores, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the Town Meetings and the ballot boxes of the last century, predicting much of what has happened to our nation writ large since then.
This utterly captivating symphonic story of city, a visionary, and the way our politics changed forever is told through the very specific people of Burlington, beginning with Dan Chiasson's own mall-punk friends of the 1980 in a video that would go viral decades later in 2020, they engaged with the itinerant carpenter turned socialist mayoral candidate, and there in that food court, the seeds of everything that was Bernie were sown. Dan, uniquely placed to bring a deep insider's perspective, knew all the the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose great grandparents had worked in the mills (his own); the puppeteers and hippies and NYC transplants looking for land and "authenticity" in Vermont; the developers involved in the era's Robert Moses urban-renewal schemes; the corrupt old-school Dems at their table in the local dive; and even Ben and Jerry who became Ben and Jerry's right there in town. They all made up the mosh pit of the Burlington that Bernie captivated, running on the slogan "Burlington is not for sale," to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, intimate with his constituents across workers, cops, lefties, and the little old ladies who organized their streets; he also boasted a foreign policy, a sudden national profile, and a bullhorn to speak to Ronald Reagan.
In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, this epic of American city life delves into the gossip--and the exhilaration--around Bernie's unlikely rise, as we watch an American place transformed one diner coffee, one neighborhood door-knock at a time.
Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, forging alliances with all comers, this is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.
This utterly captivating symphonic story of city, a visionary, and the way our politics changed forever is told through the very specific people of Burlington, beginning with Dan Chiasson's own mall-punk friends of the 1980 in a video that would go viral decades later in 2020, they engaged with the itinerant carpenter turned socialist mayoral candidate, and there in that food court, the seeds of everything that was Bernie were sown. Dan, uniquely placed to bring a deep insider's perspective, knew all the the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose great grandparents had worked in the mills (his own); the puppeteers and hippies and NYC transplants looking for land and "authenticity" in Vermont; the developers involved in the era's Robert Moses urban-renewal schemes; the corrupt old-school Dems at their table in the local dive; and even Ben and Jerry who became Ben and Jerry's right there in town. They all made up the mosh pit of the Burlington that Bernie captivated, running on the slogan "Burlington is not for sale," to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, intimate with his constituents across workers, cops, lefties, and the little old ladies who organized their streets; he also boasted a foreign policy, a sudden national profile, and a bullhorn to speak to Ronald Reagan.
In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, this epic of American city life delves into the gossip--and the exhilaration--around Bernie's unlikely rise, as we watch an American place transformed one diner coffee, one neighborhood door-knock at a time.
Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, forging alliances with all comers, this is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.
592 pages, Hardcover
Published February 3, 2026
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191 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 3, 2026
I devoured this magnificent book: part exploration of a transformational moment in one city's history, part memoir of the boy who grew up there. My wife and I moved to Vermont when we in our early 20s', drawn here first by an article in the New York Times travel section about "the People's Republic of Burlington, VT," and it was love at first sight. Dan Chiasson's remarkable book captures a world in transition, Burlington and Vermont in the 1970s and 1980s: a GE plant making gatling guns while two hippies were making ice cream a few blocks away, for instance. Chiasson was here, even if his frontal lobe was still that of a skateboarding teen, which is what makes this book so charming and (often) deeply moving. And, yes, the U.S. Senator with (my opinion) a deeply accurate moral compass is at the center, but this is also a tale about a kid who'd become one of our great poets and a city that has become one of the most fascinating in the nation. There are some wild photos in this book, too, including one that -- speaking for all the readers here on Goodreads -- is bonkers. On page 82, there’s a 1979 photo of Goddard writers, including Tobias Wolff, Jane Shore, Raymond Carver, Geoffrey Wolff, Donald Hall, Louise Gluck, and Stephen Dobyns. "Bernie for Burlington" is an absolute gem.
October 14, 2025
What a fantastic and thorough look at Bernie Sanders in his younger years when he began to rise as someone who would fight for the people. It was so fascinating to learn about the early days of a man I have always admired. His rise in popularity and up the chains of politics is so impressive and reading this reminded me of why I came to love Bernie to begin with. This is probably one of the greatest biographies I have ever read that kept my attention the entire way through. I felt like I was right there next to Bernie myself watching him over the decades. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
February 3, 2026
What Dan Chiasson’s “Bernie for Burlington” Taught Me About Power Without Spectacle – and Why the Most Important Politics Still Happens in Rooms That Smell Like Old Carpet
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 3rd, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In midtown Manhattan in the early 1950s, you could step off the avenue and into Vermont. Dan Chiasson opens “Bernie for Burlington” with that implausible premise and makes it tactile: a storefront at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, a diorama of “virtues” offered to a city that wanted to believe in snow and quiet. The move is more than ornament. It announces Chiasson’s method: begin with the way a place is dreamed of, then follow the dream as it hardens into budgets, zoning fights, and the stubborn realities of who gets to belong.
To call this book timely is also to say that it refuses to behave like a topical book. Chiasson does not chase the day’s headlines. He does not build his narrative around the high-gloss milestones of the modern political imagination. Instead he commits a quiet heresy: he stays local, and he stays long. He is interested in meetings, not rallies; budgets, not slogans; the long middle of civic life, not the climactic montage. The result is a portrait of Bernie Sanders before he became a national shorthand, and of Burlington before it became an emblem, and of the strange chemistry that occurs when a political temperament finds a city small enough to be shaped and stubborn enough to resist shaping.
Chiasson flags his posture early, with a candor that feels both ethical and stylistic. He did not speak with Bernie or Jane Sanders, and he makes no pretense of omniscience. What he offers is a book of stories constructed from friends, allies, antagonists; from disorganized archives and local newspapers; from ephemera that still smells faintly of old staplers and town bulletin boards. The intelligence of the choice is that it makes the book less about a single consciousness and more about a civic ecosystem: a biography told through the chorus of a place.
The opening chapters move through Brooklyn family history and the moral pressure of scarcity, then toward the political education of a young man trying to convert anger into usefulness. Vermont arrives as both destination and projection: a “fantasy,” Sanders’s brother Larry suggests, but an important one. Chiasson is alert to the way Vermont is sold, desired, consumed. He can’t resist the comedy of it – the notion of two lanky Midwood boys poring over glossy photographs of farms – but the humor doesn’t weaken the point. Myth is a kind of infrastructure. People build their lives inside it. They vote inside it too.
When the book shifts into the late 1970s and early 1980s, Burlington comes into view as the kind of small city where everything is visible and nothing is simple. If the national story of our time has been a story of abstraction – politics turned into entertainment, ideology turned into identity, citizens turned into audiences – Burlington insists on the opposite. Here, fights are concrete. They are about rent, zoning, public access to the waterfront, and the nagging question of whether a city belongs to its residents or to developers, institutions, and the soft coercion of “inevitability.”
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
One of Chiasson’s greatest strengths is his ability to render public goods as both physical and moral. A park is not merely a park; it is a wager on shared life. A sidewalk is not merely a sidewalk; it is a social contract in poured concrete. The book returns again and again to the “public thing” – not as an abstraction, but as an object you can stand beside. When Sanders fights for access to the waterfront, or for policies that keep Burlington from behaving like a private club, Chiasson does not frame the conflict as ideological theater. He frames it as an argument about dignity, and dignity is always spatial. Who gets to stay? Who gets to be near work, near water, near safety, near beauty?
The writing has the controlled warmth of a poet who understands that lyricism in politics can either anesthetize or clarify. Chiasson chooses clarity, and he does so by refusing grandiosity. His sentences are attentive to the minor signals of power: who has time to remain after the meeting adjourns, whose irritation is indulged, whose inconvenience is treated as an emergency, whose suffering is treated as background noise. He lingers in rooms where the air itself seems bureaucratic, then makes you feel how those rooms decide lives.
Chiasson is also, crucially, a writer of cultural detours. In a chapter that begins with Burlington’s made-for-TV cameo and drifts through the design fantasy of the pedestrian mall, he sets the city’s self-invention against the particular swagger of its mayors and the voices of its citizens. Elsewhere, MTV arrives as not merely a channel but an argument about access, youth, and the negotiation between pragmatic socialism and consumer desire. These digressions are not decorative. They are part of Chiasson’s argument that politics is never only policy; it is also taste, media, spectacle, boredom, and the everyday scripts people inherit about what a city is allowed to be.
Chiasson has a particular gift for casting light on the unglamorous middle space between legend and paperwork. His Sanders is not a saint. The book preserves, with almost mischievous honesty, the testimony of people who found him difficult: brusque, impatient, sometimes so single-minded that charisma is replaced by abrasion. It is a relief to see a political figure rendered with this kind of texture. The irritations are not merely personality quirks; they are part of a governing style that treats time as a moral resource. In Chiasson’s portrait, Sanders can look like a man whose seriousness can look like contempt, but whose contempt is often for the frivolity that keeps problems unsolved.
The cast of characters around him is one of the book’s pleasures. Chiasson is attentive to the way local politics is made not only by elected officials but by organizers, professors, reporters, campaign managers, longtime callers, and skeptics who become, reluctantly, collaborators. He writes about diners and coffee shops the way some biographers write about palaces: as sites where alliances are formed, resentments hardened, plans revised. A particular meeting over coffee can carry as much narrative charge as an election night, because in Burlington the distance between private conviction and public decision is short.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Chiasson’s archival imagination is most vivid when he follows Sanders into the odd entrepreneurial corners of a precarious life. The chapter on “The American People’s Historical Society” treats Sanders’s brief career as a small businessman not as a footnote but as a clue: a man inventing institutions because existing ones won’t accept his arguments, selling history as a way of rehearsing civic pedagogy. Then the book pivots into the more brutal economics of renting, when an eviction notice arrives like a slap: the vulnerability of making a living, the sudden fragility of housing, the way ideology becomes personal when the door may no longer open.
If the book sometimes feels like an essay collection braided into biography, that is because Chiasson trusts association as a form of explanation. Vermont’s mythos – Frost, maples, “virtues” offered for sale – is never simply background. It is an instrument, and a temptation. The book is subtle about the danger: a place that markets itself as pure can become complacent about exclusion, and a state that thinks of itself as morally exceptional can overlook the ways power reproduces itself even in small rooms. Chiasson’s Burlington is affectionate, but it is not sugarcoated.
This attentiveness makes his handling of race and belonging especially bracing in a story set in one of the whitest states in the country. Chiasson does not pretend that Burlington’s progressivism automatically resolves its tensions; he traces how ideals encounter institutions, how good intentions fray under pressure, how “community” can mean protection for some and scrutiny for others. At times you wish he pushed even harder, widening the lens beyond the circles closest to Sanders. But the book’s refusal to let local virtue become self-congratulation feels, in itself, like a political act.
There is also, throughout, a delicate comedy about American self-invention. Chiasson has an ear for the way political language can inflate and deflate in the same breath, the way earnestness can tip into performance, the way slogans become both necessary and absurd. The book’s Burlington is filled with people who believe in causes and also in lunch specials, who can argue about imperialism and then worry about potholes. That doubleness is the point. Democracy is not an abstract seminar. It is a lived style, complete with irritations, jokes, fatigue, and the stubborn desire to keep showing up.
The book’s most moving scenes are often the least cinematic. A municipal meeting stretches on and on; the miracle is not that a leader delivers a soaring speech, but that citizens remain in the room long enough to decide something together. A call-in radio show becomes an artery of democratic speech, letting people speak in their own voices rather than through the ventriloquism of press releases. Sanders’s style emerges as almost aggressively unglamorous. He is repetitive, blunt, impatient with niceties, and therefore, in Chiasson’s framing, strangely persuasive. The book does not treat this as a brand. It treats it as temperament.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
The campaign that carries the book into its heart is framed with a phrase that feels like both slogan and warning: “Burlington Is Not For Sale.” It is hard to read those pages without thinking of the current decade’s fever dream of real estate – the way cities now feel auctioned off to the highest bidder, the way “investment” language colonizes the vocabulary of home. Chiasson follows Sanders’s path as an outsider trying to become an incumbent without losing the outsider’s moral advantage. He shows the subtle work of coalition, the strategic necessity of being legible to people who fear socialism, and the personal awkwardness of a man not naturally gregarious needing, suddenly, to knock on doors.
Once Sanders is in City Hall, the book becomes a study in the romance and the drudgery of municipal power. Chiasson writes beautifully about the administrative world – the way idealism gets translated into forms, how the room itself reshapes those who enter it, how compromise can be either betrayal or technique. He is also attentive to the city’s internal divisions, including racial tensions and the uneasy work of turning rhetoric into actual policy. Burlington’s progressivism is not portrayed as automatic virtue; it is portrayed as labor.
The later chapters widen into a kind of municipal epic. There is the pragmatism of dealing with utilities and media, the desire to control the forces that shape daily life, the constant negotiation between what a city can do and what it wishes it could do. And then Chiasson turns outward, as Burlington does: to foreign policy by way of a sister-city relationship and a journey to Nicaragua, where solidarity, symbolism, and local politics collide. The effect is to remind the reader that “local” does not mean small-minded. It means grounded. It means you feel the consequences in your own streets, and therefore you cannot pretend consequences are theoretical.
The comps that come to mind are less about ideology than about method. Like “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” it treats street life as civic intelligence and planning as moral philosophy. Like “Evicted,” it understands housing as a pressure that reorganizes everything else. And like “The Power Broker,” it reminds you that decisions about space – waterfronts, downtowns, “renewal” – decide who gets to belong.
If “Bernie for Burlington” has a flaw, it is the one that often accompanies principled restraint. Because Chiasson is so committed to the ground-level view, he can occasionally feel withholding. Readers who want the clean architecture of a comprehensive biography – exhaustive chronology, constant forward propulsion, a tighter bridge to the later national persona – may find the book’s essayistic interludes too patient, its pleasures too dependent on mood. Yet the patience is also the point. In a moment when politics is increasingly mediated by screens – algorithmic outrage, viral clips, perpetual emergency – Chiasson insists on the opposite tempo. He insists that democracy is something you do slowly, with other people, in rooms that smell like old carpet.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
The afterword, set in the summer of 2024 at a family picnic in rural Vermont, makes this insistence quietly devastating. Chiasson writes about the new millennium’s atmosphere – the internet’s reshaping of consciousness, the acceleration of political feeling, the way a persona can become a technological vessel – without turning the book into a sermon about the present. He does something more literary. He sketches a “structure of feeling,” the emotional weather of an era, and suggests that Sanders’s wearied warrior persona did not simply survive into our time but became newly legible inside it.
When you finish “Bernie for Burlington,” you are less dazzled by politics than recalibrated by it. You have been taught to see benches and budgets as moral objects, to understand that “public” is not a synonym for “government” but a synonym for “shared,” and to recognize that the most consequential politics may be the politics you can still walk to. For its literary intelligence, its fidelity to civic texture, and its refusal of spectacle in an age addicted to it, I would rate the book 91 out of 100.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 3rd, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
In midtown Manhattan in the early 1950s, you could step off the avenue and into Vermont. Dan Chiasson opens “Bernie for Burlington” with that implausible premise and makes it tactile: a storefront at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, a diorama of “virtues” offered to a city that wanted to believe in snow and quiet. The move is more than ornament. It announces Chiasson’s method: begin with the way a place is dreamed of, then follow the dream as it hardens into budgets, zoning fights, and the stubborn realities of who gets to belong.
To call this book timely is also to say that it refuses to behave like a topical book. Chiasson does not chase the day’s headlines. He does not build his narrative around the high-gloss milestones of the modern political imagination. Instead he commits a quiet heresy: he stays local, and he stays long. He is interested in meetings, not rallies; budgets, not slogans; the long middle of civic life, not the climactic montage. The result is a portrait of Bernie Sanders before he became a national shorthand, and of Burlington before it became an emblem, and of the strange chemistry that occurs when a political temperament finds a city small enough to be shaped and stubborn enough to resist shaping.
Chiasson flags his posture early, with a candor that feels both ethical and stylistic. He did not speak with Bernie or Jane Sanders, and he makes no pretense of omniscience. What he offers is a book of stories constructed from friends, allies, antagonists; from disorganized archives and local newspapers; from ephemera that still smells faintly of old staplers and town bulletin boards. The intelligence of the choice is that it makes the book less about a single consciousness and more about a civic ecosystem: a biography told through the chorus of a place.
The opening chapters move through Brooklyn family history and the moral pressure of scarcity, then toward the political education of a young man trying to convert anger into usefulness. Vermont arrives as both destination and projection: a “fantasy,” Sanders’s brother Larry suggests, but an important one. Chiasson is alert to the way Vermont is sold, desired, consumed. He can’t resist the comedy of it – the notion of two lanky Midwood boys poring over glossy photographs of farms – but the humor doesn’t weaken the point. Myth is a kind of infrastructure. People build their lives inside it. They vote inside it too.
When the book shifts into the late 1970s and early 1980s, Burlington comes into view as the kind of small city where everything is visible and nothing is simple. If the national story of our time has been a story of abstraction – politics turned into entertainment, ideology turned into identity, citizens turned into audiences – Burlington insists on the opposite. Here, fights are concrete. They are about rent, zoning, public access to the waterfront, and the nagging question of whether a city belongs to its residents or to developers, institutions, and the soft coercion of “inevitability.”
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
One of Chiasson’s greatest strengths is his ability to render public goods as both physical and moral. A park is not merely a park; it is a wager on shared life. A sidewalk is not merely a sidewalk; it is a social contract in poured concrete. The book returns again and again to the “public thing” – not as an abstraction, but as an object you can stand beside. When Sanders fights for access to the waterfront, or for policies that keep Burlington from behaving like a private club, Chiasson does not frame the conflict as ideological theater. He frames it as an argument about dignity, and dignity is always spatial. Who gets to stay? Who gets to be near work, near water, near safety, near beauty?
The writing has the controlled warmth of a poet who understands that lyricism in politics can either anesthetize or clarify. Chiasson chooses clarity, and he does so by refusing grandiosity. His sentences are attentive to the minor signals of power: who has time to remain after the meeting adjourns, whose irritation is indulged, whose inconvenience is treated as an emergency, whose suffering is treated as background noise. He lingers in rooms where the air itself seems bureaucratic, then makes you feel how those rooms decide lives.
Chiasson is also, crucially, a writer of cultural detours. In a chapter that begins with Burlington’s made-for-TV cameo and drifts through the design fantasy of the pedestrian mall, he sets the city’s self-invention against the particular swagger of its mayors and the voices of its citizens. Elsewhere, MTV arrives as not merely a channel but an argument about access, youth, and the negotiation between pragmatic socialism and consumer desire. These digressions are not decorative. They are part of Chiasson’s argument that politics is never only policy; it is also taste, media, spectacle, boredom, and the everyday scripts people inherit about what a city is allowed to be.
Chiasson has a particular gift for casting light on the unglamorous middle space between legend and paperwork. His Sanders is not a saint. The book preserves, with almost mischievous honesty, the testimony of people who found him difficult: brusque, impatient, sometimes so single-minded that charisma is replaced by abrasion. It is a relief to see a political figure rendered with this kind of texture. The irritations are not merely personality quirks; they are part of a governing style that treats time as a moral resource. In Chiasson’s portrait, Sanders can look like a man whose seriousness can look like contempt, but whose contempt is often for the frivolity that keeps problems unsolved.
The cast of characters around him is one of the book’s pleasures. Chiasson is attentive to the way local politics is made not only by elected officials but by organizers, professors, reporters, campaign managers, longtime callers, and skeptics who become, reluctantly, collaborators. He writes about diners and coffee shops the way some biographers write about palaces: as sites where alliances are formed, resentments hardened, plans revised. A particular meeting over coffee can carry as much narrative charge as an election night, because in Burlington the distance between private conviction and public decision is short.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Chiasson’s archival imagination is most vivid when he follows Sanders into the odd entrepreneurial corners of a precarious life. The chapter on “The American People’s Historical Society” treats Sanders’s brief career as a small businessman not as a footnote but as a clue: a man inventing institutions because existing ones won’t accept his arguments, selling history as a way of rehearsing civic pedagogy. Then the book pivots into the more brutal economics of renting, when an eviction notice arrives like a slap: the vulnerability of making a living, the sudden fragility of housing, the way ideology becomes personal when the door may no longer open.
If the book sometimes feels like an essay collection braided into biography, that is because Chiasson trusts association as a form of explanation. Vermont’s mythos – Frost, maples, “virtues” offered for sale – is never simply background. It is an instrument, and a temptation. The book is subtle about the danger: a place that markets itself as pure can become complacent about exclusion, and a state that thinks of itself as morally exceptional can overlook the ways power reproduces itself even in small rooms. Chiasson’s Burlington is affectionate, but it is not sugarcoated.
This attentiveness makes his handling of race and belonging especially bracing in a story set in one of the whitest states in the country. Chiasson does not pretend that Burlington’s progressivism automatically resolves its tensions; he traces how ideals encounter institutions, how good intentions fray under pressure, how “community” can mean protection for some and scrutiny for others. At times you wish he pushed even harder, widening the lens beyond the circles closest to Sanders. But the book’s refusal to let local virtue become self-congratulation feels, in itself, like a political act.
There is also, throughout, a delicate comedy about American self-invention. Chiasson has an ear for the way political language can inflate and deflate in the same breath, the way earnestness can tip into performance, the way slogans become both necessary and absurd. The book’s Burlington is filled with people who believe in causes and also in lunch specials, who can argue about imperialism and then worry about potholes. That doubleness is the point. Democracy is not an abstract seminar. It is a lived style, complete with irritations, jokes, fatigue, and the stubborn desire to keep showing up.
The book’s most moving scenes are often the least cinematic. A municipal meeting stretches on and on; the miracle is not that a leader delivers a soaring speech, but that citizens remain in the room long enough to decide something together. A call-in radio show becomes an artery of democratic speech, letting people speak in their own voices rather than through the ventriloquism of press releases. Sanders’s style emerges as almost aggressively unglamorous. He is repetitive, blunt, impatient with niceties, and therefore, in Chiasson’s framing, strangely persuasive. The book does not treat this as a brand. It treats it as temperament.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
The campaign that carries the book into its heart is framed with a phrase that feels like both slogan and warning: “Burlington Is Not For Sale.” It is hard to read those pages without thinking of the current decade’s fever dream of real estate – the way cities now feel auctioned off to the highest bidder, the way “investment” language colonizes the vocabulary of home. Chiasson follows Sanders’s path as an outsider trying to become an incumbent without losing the outsider’s moral advantage. He shows the subtle work of coalition, the strategic necessity of being legible to people who fear socialism, and the personal awkwardness of a man not naturally gregarious needing, suddenly, to knock on doors.
Once Sanders is in City Hall, the book becomes a study in the romance and the drudgery of municipal power. Chiasson writes beautifully about the administrative world – the way idealism gets translated into forms, how the room itself reshapes those who enter it, how compromise can be either betrayal or technique. He is also attentive to the city’s internal divisions, including racial tensions and the uneasy work of turning rhetoric into actual policy. Burlington’s progressivism is not portrayed as automatic virtue; it is portrayed as labor.
The later chapters widen into a kind of municipal epic. There is the pragmatism of dealing with utilities and media, the desire to control the forces that shape daily life, the constant negotiation between what a city can do and what it wishes it could do. And then Chiasson turns outward, as Burlington does: to foreign policy by way of a sister-city relationship and a journey to Nicaragua, where solidarity, symbolism, and local politics collide. The effect is to remind the reader that “local” does not mean small-minded. It means grounded. It means you feel the consequences in your own streets, and therefore you cannot pretend consequences are theoretical.
The comps that come to mind are less about ideology than about method. Like “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” it treats street life as civic intelligence and planning as moral philosophy. Like “Evicted,” it understands housing as a pressure that reorganizes everything else. And like “The Power Broker,” it reminds you that decisions about space – waterfronts, downtowns, “renewal” – decide who gets to belong.
If “Bernie for Burlington” has a flaw, it is the one that often accompanies principled restraint. Because Chiasson is so committed to the ground-level view, he can occasionally feel withholding. Readers who want the clean architecture of a comprehensive biography – exhaustive chronology, constant forward propulsion, a tighter bridge to the later national persona – may find the book’s essayistic interludes too patient, its pleasures too dependent on mood. Yet the patience is also the point. In a moment when politics is increasingly mediated by screens – algorithmic outrage, viral clips, perpetual emergency – Chiasson insists on the opposite tempo. He insists that democracy is something you do slowly, with other people, in rooms that smell like old carpet.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
The afterword, set in the summer of 2024 at a family picnic in rural Vermont, makes this insistence quietly devastating. Chiasson writes about the new millennium’s atmosphere – the internet’s reshaping of consciousness, the acceleration of political feeling, the way a persona can become a technological vessel – without turning the book into a sermon about the present. He does something more literary. He sketches a “structure of feeling,” the emotional weather of an era, and suggests that Sanders’s wearied warrior persona did not simply survive into our time but became newly legible inside it.
When you finish “Bernie for Burlington,” you are less dazzled by politics than recalibrated by it. You have been taught to see benches and budgets as moral objects, to understand that “public” is not a synonym for “government” but a synonym for “shared,” and to recognize that the most consequential politics may be the politics you can still walk to. For its literary intelligence, its fidelity to civic texture, and its refusal of spectacle in an age addicted to it, I would rate the book 91 out of 100.
October 22, 2025
I absolutely loved Bernie for Burlington by Dan Chiasson. This audiobook paints a vivid, heartfelt portrait of Bernie Sanders in his formative years, long before he became a national name. Chiasson’s storytelling made me feel like I was walking alongside Bernie as he knocked on doors, argued for justice, and built his grassroots movement from scratch.
The level of research and detail in this biography is phenomenal. Chiasson explores the complex mix of people and politics that shaped Burlington—blue-collar workers, hippies, activists, and old-school politicians—and shows how Bernie managed to bring them together under a shared cause. His rise wasn’t easy, but every setback and success helped define the uncompromising passion that we still see in him today.
As someone who has admired Bernie for years, this book reminded me why. He is relentless in his dedication to the people, to fairness, and to progress. The fact that he’s still out there, even after the 2024 election, fighting for ordinary Americans, speaks volumes about his character.
This is one of the best political biographies I’ve ever read—thorough, emotional, and truly inspiring. It’s a must-read for anyone who believes in community, equality, and the power of persistence.
The level of research and detail in this biography is phenomenal. Chiasson explores the complex mix of people and politics that shaped Burlington—blue-collar workers, hippies, activists, and old-school politicians—and shows how Bernie managed to bring them together under a shared cause. His rise wasn’t easy, but every setback and success helped define the uncompromising passion that we still see in him today.
As someone who has admired Bernie for years, this book reminded me why. He is relentless in his dedication to the people, to fairness, and to progress. The fact that he’s still out there, even after the 2024 election, fighting for ordinary Americans, speaks volumes about his character.
This is one of the best political biographies I’ve ever read—thorough, emotional, and truly inspiring. It’s a must-read for anyone who believes in community, equality, and the power of persistence.
November 30, 2025
I picked up Bernie for Burlington by Dan Chiasson the moment I saw it, and I’m so glad I did. When I think of socialism in the U.S., Bernie Sanders is pretty much my point of reference — but I realized I knew almost nothing about his early political life or what he actually did as mayor of Burlington.
This book ended up being an excellent crash course. It’s a clear, thorough, and surprisingly engaging look at “Bernie before he was Bernie,” showing how his ideas, leadership style, and political instincts were shaped long before he became a national figure. Chiasson does a great job laying out both the context and the real impact Bernie had locally.
If you’re curious about Sanders’ background or want a deeper understanding of how his political identity formed, this is a great starting point. Very readable, very informative, and absolutely worth picking up.
Thank you to NetGalley for this eARC.
This book ended up being an excellent crash course. It’s a clear, thorough, and surprisingly engaging look at “Bernie before he was Bernie,” showing how his ideas, leadership style, and political instincts were shaped long before he became a national figure. Chiasson does a great job laying out both the context and the real impact Bernie had locally.
If you’re curious about Sanders’ background or want a deeper understanding of how his political identity formed, this is a great starting point. Very readable, very informative, and absolutely worth picking up.
Thank you to NetGalley for this eARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I received a free copy of, Bernie for Burlington, by Dan Chiasson, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This book is a history of Burlington, Vermont and Bernie Sanders. This book was informative and has a lot of pages.
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