Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress. By Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 456p. $35.00 cloth.

volume is more of a well-earned career valedictory and synthesis of normative reforms than a presentation of original empirical research. However, for a book that aims to emphasize how useful understanding local politics might be for solving contemporary national problems, the discussion here is fairly light on the renewed and rapidly developing literature that combines cuttingedge empirical techniques with local data and urbanist theories to critically engage contemporary political science and share lessons about how local institutions shape nationally pressing questions (see, e.g., Einstein, Glick, and Palmer, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis, 2020; Grumbach, Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics 2022; and Ogorzalek, The Cities on the Hill: How Urban Institutions Transformed National Politics, 2018). Because of this approach, the volume is probably more pedagogically appropriate for an undergraduate or popular audience than for graduate students or other analysts who are already steeped in the literature on local politics, deliberative democracy, or democratic backsliding. Democracy in America is under pressure from the reaction of the “threatened” outgoing majority. As Simpson shows, getting to know cities like Chicago, with their long and fraught experience navigating the turbulence of demographic change but coming out the other side intact and even with moments of true inspiration, will provide actors and analysts helpful lessons for the coming decades.