Inspiring for those who think politics is only for the rich and well connected.
Political analyst Jean-Pierre's enthusiastic first book documents her life in politics and offers advice and encouragement to those thinking of taking a similar path.
Born in Martinique, the author was raised by working-class Haitian immigrant parents in New York. Realizing that she wasn’t going to fulfill her parents' dream that she become a doctor, she was drawn to politics after getting a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University. She was a regional director for the John Edwards campaign in 2004, served as Barack Obama's regional political director in the Office of Political Affairs, and is now the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn.org and a political analyst for MSNBC. Along the way, she documents some of the pressures of entering the political scene as a young, black, immigrant, lesbian woman. However, she doesn’t dwell on these pressures, mentioning only in passing her experience of childhood sexual abuse and a suicide attempt. Instead, she focuses on the lessons of hard work and determination that she learned from her family. A committed Democrat, she believes unequivocally that Donald Trump is “unfit to be president.” Throughout the narrative, the author leaps from topic to topic, following a vaguely chronological arc without lingering long or delving deep into any subject or period of her life for more than a few pages. The book will be most useful as a source of advice and encouragement for those who think they might be interested in political action but don't know where to start. Jean-Pierre offers strategies for networking, which she sees as the primary way to get ahead in the world of politics, and counsels pragmatism, patience, and frequent expression of gratitude. She also advocates for the role of local politics rather than “pulling up your roots, loading the van, and driving to Washington, to your state capital, or even to your county seat.”
Inspiring for those who think politics is only for the rich and well connected.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-91783-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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