Then, Buttigieg defied the expectations that came with his pedigree, choosing to return home to Indiana and responding to the ultimate challenge of how to revive a once-great industrial city and help steer its future in the twenty-first century.Elected at twenty-nine as the nation's youngest mayor, Pete Buttigieg immediately recognized that 'great cities, and even great nations, are built through attention to the everyday.' As Shortest Way Home recalls, the challenges were daunting-whether confronting gun violence, renaming a street in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., or attracting tech companies to a city that had appealed more to junk bond scavengers than serious investors.

Kennedy's legacy, Buttigieg first left northern Indiana for red-bricked Harvard and then studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before joining McKinsey, where he trained as a consultant-becoming, of all things, an expert in grocery pricing. With soaring prose that celebrates a resurgent American Midwest, Shortest Way Home narrates the heroic transformation of a 'dying city' (Newsweek) into nothing less than a shining model of urban reinvention.Interweaving two narratives-that of a young man coming of age and a town regaining its economic vitality-Buttigieg recounts growing up in a Rust Belt city, amid decayed factory buildings and the steady soundtrack of rumbling freight trains passing through on their long journey to Chicagoland. Once described by the Washington Post as 'the most interesting mayor you've never heard of,' Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has now emerged as one of the nation's most visionary politicians.

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