Provocative, galvanizing words that should inspire others to take action against the status quo.
A black woman opens up about her journey to the forefront of American politics.
Sanders knew from an early age that being black put her at a disadvantage. “Wherever my pinpoint location was exactly,” she writes, “I knew for sure that I was way outside [the] innermost circle.” She also knew she wasn’t going to let the establishment—those with access to the power in this country, i.e., older white men—hold her back. In this snappy narrative, the author chronicles her internships and college studies, which put her on track to becoming a commentator on CNN and then Bernie Sanders’ national press secretary during his 2016 presidential campaign. She has created waves in the political arena and opened doors for those coming up behind her, much like Donna Brazile and other black women have done for her. Currently, the author is a senior adviser for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, and she addresses the reasons she moved from one candidate to another during the past four years. Sanders interweaves “pieces of advice” sidebars into her personal narrative—e.g., build as many relationships and networks as possible, since you never know when they may be useful; write down your goals and work toward achieving them; be true to yourself in looks and manners; and so on. The author also includes a solid analysis of the political landscape and does not hold back her views on the Trump administration. The powerful message of her book can be encapsulated by these three sentences: “No one is going to hand you power or open the door for you to voice your opinion or your desires. You have to demand it. And part of the way you do that is saying out loud, to anyone who will listen, what it is that you want, and then backing those words up with actions.”
Provocative, galvanizing words that should inspire others to take action against the status quo.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294268-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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