He is the second most recognized political figure in the world and yet we know little about him. But a new book changes all that.

by Kevin Ellis, on Conflict of Interest

Several years ago, at a sidewalk bike shop in rural Mexico, a guy asked me where I’m from.

“Vermont,’’ I said.

“Bernie Sanders!’’ he replied with a wide smile.

It was then that I realized that Bernie Sanders was the most recognizable political figure in the world. Trump has since seized that mantle, albeit as a villain, like Darth Vader, or better yet Voldemort. But Bernie Sanders still holds a unique place in the world, like Muhammad Ali, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Gloria Steinem. These people are above. They inhabit a different place. Books upon books have been written about them. And for the most part, people like them. In the modern vernacular, they are brands.

Yet when it comes to Bernie, we don’t really know a lot about him. Where did he come from? Why is he so popular? What fuels his maniacal focus on his issues of class, wealth and inequality? Was it his parents? The cities that made him – first Brooklyn, then tiny Burlington, VT? What cultural and political forces joined together to make Bernie Sanders into the guy you see on TV, hear on the radio or see at a rally. Or more fun for us Vermonters, the guy you see on the street or in the airport.

We learned small tidbits during his 2020 campaign for president, not so much because he wanted to share. Bernie is famous for having little patience for the personal, for legacy, for personal details that shed light on character. All that distracts from the core effort – to bend the political system to a more egalitarian place where working people have more power than the capitalists.

He did share personal details in 2020 because consultants (whom he loathes) told him he must. So reluctantly, he told his story. The son of Jewish immigrants in a part of Brooklyn no one knows about today. A home where money was scarce. So Bernie and his brother understood poverty and the working class. Moves to Vermont and starts building a movement based on his ideas around socialism, Eugene Debs as his hero.

But beyond that – not much.

Well now you can have it all, the whole story. The origin of Bernie Sanders. And for guys like me it is manna from heaven.

Bernie for Burlington – The Rise of the People’s Politician has hit book stores. The author is not a political journalist. But a poet. Dan Chiasson is the chair of the English department at Wellesley College and grew up in Burlington with a bird’s eye view of the Bernie’s rise. He spent three years digging into the story, interviewed all the players, especially those who went with Bernie on the first mission, running for mayor of Burlington.

Bernie was gone from the mayor’s office in Burlington by the time I arrived in 1991. So I watched his people in transition. A new mayor named Pete Clavelle, a progressive yes. But not exactly a Bernie devotee. Other Bernie figures receded to the background, replaced a next generation.

There are dozens of great lines and anecdotes in the book. And Chiasson tracks them down in exhaustive fashion.

“You have to remember that Bernie and Reagan coincide almost perfectly,’’ Peter Clavelle says. “Without Reagan, there is no Bernie.’’

The book gets deep into the marrow of Bernie Sanders, especially where he comes from, how he recognized the opportunity to win political office and the personality that drives it all.

You can read this book in lots of ways. As a Vermonter, you will recognize all the sights – downtown Burlington in the 1980s and 90s. The rural hamlet of Middlesex where Bernie first owned land. Stratty Lines’s Oasis diner where deals were cut and Bill Clinton lunched. (But Bernie always preferred – and still does – Henry’s diner down the street.) The communes around the state inhabited by rebellious young people fed up with the Vietnam War and their parents. “How come you’re not involved with your town government,’’ Bernie asked. Eventually, many of them did get involved. And they turned a rock-ribbed Republican state into a liberal Democratic one. And Bernie Sanders would fight and argue with those Democrats his entire career.

As a policy and politics person, you can enjoy the fights Mayor Bernie Sanders got into with the major corporate and political players – the University of Vermont, the railroad, and of course the Democratic Party, where another presidential candidate, Howard Dean, plays a role.

Or you can read the book as a study in how a young man grows up in a small Brooklyn apartment with parents fighting about money and yearns for a broader canvas.

Bernie and his brother see an ad – at Rockefeller Center of all places – for land in Vermont. So they bought 85 acres in Middlesex, about 20 minutes from my house. The move wasn’t to build a second home or ski chalet as people do today. It was an escape. A way out of New York.

And there is a fourth way to read this book. Bernie’s Sanders’ life in Burlington intersected with Chiasson’s, himself a Burlington kid whose family struggled with money and who knew every nook and crannie of the place. Chiasson got to see Bernie’s political rise up close, not as an advisor. But as a citizen, a kid who was materially helped by Sanders’ efforts and inspired by the rhetoric that still pours out of him on CNN.

Chiasson remembers the Burlington before Bernie in 1970s and 80s, the Italian neighborhood demolished to make way for “urban renewal,’’ the early effort to develop the waterfront into a sparkling asset for the people instead of developers. All the while, Mayor Bernie Sanders was a fixture at basketball courts and parks around the city.

“Make it, take it,’’ is a common phrase in urban pick-up basketball. It’s a small thing. But it’s not very socialist. If you score, you get to keep the ball. Ruthlessly capitalist actually. I imagine asking Bernie about that. But it would probably irritate him.

The book shows a very human side of Bernie Sanders, who, after several failed runs for elective office, almost drops out of politics. With no visible means of financial support, Chiasson writes that Sanders almost gave it up to write, teach or do carpentry.

But a colleague/friend had studied the results of recent mayoral elections and noticed a pattern. Young voters were there for the taking. So too were Republicans, hungry to shake up the staid Democratic machine that ruled the city along with the Catholic Church.

He won the mayoral election of 1980 by 10 votes with little idea how to run a city, get the streets plowed or pick up the garbage. But he figured it out with a devoted team of young activists who worked for little or no pay and were often frustrated by their boss’s Ahab-like single-mindedness.

Indeed, one of the highlights of the book is an intervention staged by the staff, intended to save Bernie from himself. They wrote him a memo and then confronted him. He was mean, never smiled, mistreated staff, they told him. And it would ruin him politically. The incident ends with one staff member saying Bernie never changed and the staff went right on with their work. Classic.

The book ends with Bernie’s election to Congress. Chiasson sees no need to regurgitate the two presidential runs and the ways in which the Democratic Party sabotaged him and paved the way for Trump. (Hmmm – maybe I should write that)

Chiasson is an accomplished poet and writer, not a political journalist per se. So he doesn’t go where he might get over his head. But he uses the journalist’s tools – the phone, in-person visits, email and a heap of curiosity and devotion to the subject – to unearth the details we want and need to know about how Berne Sanders got here.

There is Greg Guma, a rival for the progressive banner, Peter Diamondstone, a lovable socialist who became a thorn in the Sanders side, Sadie White, the local gadfly who made it possible, Jane Driscoll, an aide who would become Mrs. Sanders, Sneakers Bar and Grill, Jim Schumacher, a bagel shop worker who became a campaign aide, Debbie Bookchin, reporter and future Bernie press secretary, political wizard David Clavelle.

It is all there in one big book. Bernie and Jane did not cooperate with Chiasson, who I interviewed about the book at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC recently. He says their cooperation would have hamstrung him and his reporting. I agree.

It was the right call for both sides. We now have the political biography of a political legend through the eyes of a growing teenager and those who signed up for the Bernie mission.

We should be grateful that he did the work.