An entertaining look inside the White House.
President Barack Obama’s former deputy chief of staff makes her literary debut in a candid and charming memoir of her unexpected career in government.
Growing up in upstate New York, Mastromonaco, now the chief communications and talent officer at A&E Networks, describes herself as a “good(-ish) student” with no real career aspirations. She majored in French and had a summer internship with Bernie Sanders. After graduating, she worked as a paralegal and then for John Kerry as staff assistant to the press and, during his 2004 presidential campaign, as deputy scheduler, a post she portrays as grueling. “There is no more important commodity than the candidate’s time,” she quickly learned. After Kerry lost, a friend suggested she interview for a job with Obama, who was running for the Senate. Beginning with that campaign, she worked her way up to becoming the youngest deputy chief of staff. As a woman in a male-dominated field, Mastromonaco has been repeatedly asked, “how could someone like you end up in a job like that?” This book, written with the assistance of Broadly contributing editor Oyler, is her answer, addressed to women considering a leap into the demanding, “hierarchical and patriarchal” world of politics. “I think my story can make you all feel less alone, less weird, less anxious, and more confident,” she writes, encouragingly. The workload, she readily admits, is overwhelming: “Everyone thinks that traveling with the president has got to be a sweet gig—lush service, pampering, the nicest meals. It is not.” It requires juggling myriad tasks and being ready to handle any emergency. Her hair turned white from stress. Mastromonaco portrays Obama as kind, smart, focused, and utterly committed to his ideals. Even when he decided to run for president, she writes, he wasn’t “buying into his own hype.” The memoir abounds with intimate glimpses of Washington, D.C., celebrities (Biden, Clinton, Michelle Obama, and scores more) and cheerfully dispensed survival strategies.
An entertaining look inside the White House.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8822-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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