A GOOD FIGHT

Name: A GOOD FIGHT
Author: Sarah Brady
ISBN: 1-58648-105-3

by Sarah Brady with Merrill McLoughlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Self-aware and committed, Brady offers an extended pep talk for women facing crises of their own, as well as a personal...

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The spirited autobiography of the noted gun-control advocate and onetime Republican loyalist.

A good fight, indeed: Brady emerges from these pages as nothing if not a scrapper, unwilling to give in to the raft of bad luck that’s been her lot. First, of course, there was the shooting of her husband Jim, brain-damaged and confined to a wheelchair, thanks to would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley. Second was the slow discovery that their young son Scott suffered from sensory integration problems, which made him “something of a handful, to put it mildly.” Third, and one of the most affecting moments of Brady’s narrative, was her long and ongoing battle against lung cancer, brought on, she admits, by years of smoking and a once-insurmountable addiction to tobacco. Chapter by chapter, she meets all these tests head-on, writing of her work in agitating for national gun-control legislation, in helping Scott and Jim go about the difficult business of daily life, and of wrestling with her own doubts and shortcomings. Her mood is largely cheerful and even homey (“We always have beef for Christmas dinner”), though she fires off a few zingers here and there (“Charlton Heston, who later would become my chief adversary . . . struck me—I remember it vividly—as a pompous ass”). Brady tends toward platitude, confining her reflections on matters such as the Hinckley attempt to easily digested morsels: “God only knows what demons drove him to do what he did.” But that’s beside the point, and by the end, all but the most cynical reader will be rooting for Brady—and, likely, for the causes she espouses.

Self-aware and committed, Brady offers an extended pep talk for women facing crises of their own, as well as a personal memoir—and it works on both levels.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-58648-105-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.