A flawed but deeply personal recounting of one woman’s rise through the political ranks.
A comprehensive autobiography by the first female U.S. senator from Minnesota.
For anyone interested in the intricate details of how a young girl from Minneapolis made it to a seat in the Senate, Klobuchar (Uncovering the Dome, 1986) has written that book. Humorous at times, honest, and meticulously detailed, occasionally to a fault, the author unveils her entire life’s history with a slow, steady pace. She chronicles her grandparents’ immigrant status, her father’s rise through journalism and his troubles with alcohol, her mother’s years as a teacher and stay-at-home mom, her parents’ divorce, and how these events affected her early childhood. She discusses her school years, beginning with kindergarten, and takes readers up through high school, college, and law school. Once this preliminary history is out of the way, Klobuchar tackles her years in the law business, and she discusses a variety of cases she worked on with her colleagues. She also recounts her marriage to husband John and the birth and early health issues of her daughter, Abigail. She then moves into her political run for county attorney, which eventually led to her years as senator. Throughout the book, Klobuchar provides a wealth of daily minutiae—e.g., the day she was babysitting and hid a half-eaten bologna sandwich under the couch, that her wedding dress was a “sample,” and the sparring she encountered over moving some furniture in the county attorney’s office reception area. These facts add quaintness to the narrative but also bog it down. Still, Klobuchar provides an informative chronicle balanced between her personal and political lives, one that reflects the stance she took early in life to overcome any obstacles thrown her way and how she has used that same drive to surmount the numerous obstructions she has faced while serving as senator.
A flawed but deeply personal recounting of one woman’s rise through the political ranks.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-417-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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