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@QuasLacrimas dismisses a popular Royko political history as stylistically…

2026-04-04 · 01:25 UTC ·@QuasLacrimas ·1 min read

Brief

@QuasLacrimas dismisses a popular Royko political history as stylistically grating and methodologically weak. The critique centers on ornate anecdotal writing, lack of evidentiary support, and a specific claim about Daley and Kennedy in Illinois that made the author stop reading and question the reliability of the preceding 200 pages, despite conceding the topic itself remains worth studying.

Source evidence

title: @QuasLacrimas: Everyone recommended this book: family, friends, twitter mutuals. I didn't like it at all. I find th...
author: @QuasLacrimas
contenttype: tweet
publication: Twitter/X
published: 2026-04-04T01:25:02+00:00
sourceurl: https://x.com/QuasLacrimas/status/2040239185349488737

word_count: 151

Everyone recommended this book: family, friends, twitter mutuals. I didn't like it at all. I find the mid-century journalist prose insufferable, made a very short book feel much longer. Royko is long on molecular-level anecdotes and short on evidence; he expect you to take most of his conclusions as oracular in nature. A lot of it is minutia of long-forgotten urban vendettas, so I guess it wouldn't matter much if Royko got some of it wrong, but when I got to Royko pronouncing that Daley didn't tip Kennedy over the line to win Illinois, I put it down, because I realized I just didn't know how reliable anything I'd read in the previous 200 pages was. Maybe in an "eat your vegetables" sense you should still want to read about how the pre-war American urban political machines worked, but these are vegetables you should take with a heaping side of salt.