Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

Pete Buttigieg

Feb 2019 · Liveright Publishing

About this ebook

Featuring a new introduction and a “Back Home” afterword, Shortest Way Home is Pete Buttigieg’s inspirational story that challenges our perception of the typical American politician.

The meteoric rise of the mayor of a small Midwest city, who defied every pundit’s odds with his electrifying run for the presidency, created one of the most surprising candidacies in recent American history. The fact that his New York Times best-selling memoir, Shortest Way Home, didn’t read like your typical campaign book only added to “Mayor Pete’s” transcendent appeal. Readers everywhere, old and young, came to appreciate the “stirring, honest, and often beautiful” (Jill Lepore, New Yorker) personal stories and gripping mayoral tales, which provided, in lyrical prose, the political and philosophical foundations of his historic campaign.

Now featuring a new introduction and a “Back Home” afterword, in which Buttigieg movingly returns with the reader to his roots in his hometown city of South Bend, Indiana, as well as a transcript of the eulogy for his father, Joseph Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home, already considered a classic of the political memoir form, provides us with a beacon of hope at a time of social despair and political crisis.

Ratings and reviews

So literally all the reviews on here are canned and appear to be placed his publishers and marketing agents. It frustrates me that was allowed. So I finished this book in one night, my honest opinion is it feels like his editor was asleep at the wheel and then would wake up and say add more description. Pete if we were friends I would have done you more of a service. Obviously rushed for 2020 elections, the chapters lack cohesion and order. I found it hard to read. Some telling parts but overall I think it reads like someone trying to posture for a higher office and this was the master plan to help fund that climb...just unfortunate. SB is a dynamic City that could have had so much more accomplished if you did more, I'd rather read that over how you learned sewers are very expensive on a project yet to be completed...Overall I wish there was more...begs the question, how is this "a model to fix America?"

Like so many others, I loved this book. Buttigieg tells his story, and that of South Bend, with clarity and wit.

A very inspiring story, that gives hope for the future of this country.

About the author

Born in Indiana in 1982, Pete Buttigieg is the US secretary of transportation and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. A Rhodes Scholar and Navy veteran, Buttigieg was educated at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. He and his husband live in South Bend.