One of Kirkus Reviews’s “Most Anticipated Nonfiction of Spring 2026”
One of Lit Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2026”
“The more I read of Dan Chiasson’s book, the more moved I was by how absolutely unwavering Bernie’s message has been across the many decades of his career.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, on creating the cover art for Bernie for Burlington
“Story-telling has various eternal wellsprings: history and gossip, the local and the epic, jokes and legends. Bernie for Burlington orchestrates energy from all of the above in a wild variety of stories, voices and characters. At the center, Bernie Sanders of Brooklyn and Burlington is an important and unlikely hero, and Dan Chiasson of Burlington and American poetry is a masterful and unlikely narrator.” —Robert Pinsky
“This is a book we need right now—a big, lovingly-woven, Whitmanesque wickerwork of grievances and glories, home truths and triumphs, about a Brooklyn kid and the city on the shore of Lake Champlain where he shaped his compassionate cause. Read it and you’ll never think about local politics the same way again.” —Nicholson Baker
“A fascinating portrait of hard-knocks Burlington, Vermont, and of its ingenious, enterprising, indefatigable socialist mayor, Bernie Sanders, who went from seat-of-the-pants “perennial candidate” to national fame.” —Ian Frazier
“Two down-and-out characters—an unruly perennial fringe candidate and a decaying New England mill town—joined forces at an unpropitious political moment to create a left populism and new urbanism whose revitalizing influence is still growing nationwide. Dan Chiasson relates this Vermont fable with a historian’s rigor, a poet’s eye, and a memoirist’s sharp evocations of time and place. I couldn’t put it down.” —Timothy Noah, staff writer at The New Republic and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
“The transformation of ‘one small city, one small state’ ignites a political revolution in this memoir and cultural history of a mass movement. With Bernie Sanders as the lens, Chiasson, a poet and literary critic, offers a genesis story about shifting identities in Burlington and Vermont, inexorably linked with Sanders’s rise as a national political force. Written with the intimacy of a love letter to the author’s hometown, its 500-plus pages are filled with Burlington characters, vignettes of Bernie being Bernie, and key inflection points that capture the consistency of Sanders’s messaging and paint an unrivaled portrait of Vermont over the last 50 years.” —Gabriella Gage, Harvard Magazine
“In a detailed, rich profile of this iconic public figure, Chiasson takes readers from Sanders’s Brooklyn childhood through his adolescent dreams of escape to the verdant wilderness of Vermont, years of activism and increasing local influence, and the successful 1990 congressional campaign that catapulted Sanders onto the national stage. . . . Chiasson is a great storyteller, effortlessly creating context and conveying nuance. . . . This amusing, provocative, painstaking, and wide-ranging political biography is sure to appeal to a wide audience.” —Kathleen McBroom, Booklist (starred review)
“Few political books are this well written. . . . Elegant sentences, evocative scene setting, and insightful conclusions about Sanders’s ‘consistency’ and durable message. . . . An observant, eloquent dual portrait of an uncommon public servant and his adopted home city.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Ambitious. . . . illuminating. . . . [Bernie for Burlington] covers a massive amount of territory, including hot-button issues of Sanders’s mayorship. . . and the author’s own experiences growing up in Burlington. . . . Most intriguing is Chiasson’s delineation of Sanders’s outsider role within Vermont’s counterculture . . . [which] developed a class-driven ideology unique even among his lefty milieu. This new vision became the nascent seed for today’s socialist movement in the U.S., giving Chiasson’s dense account some historical heft.” —Publishers Weekly
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