A memoir that makes palpable the immense influence of an organization that has improved so many women’s lives.
The president of Planned Parenthood recounts her life as an activist.
For decades, Richards has been at the forefront of anti-war, civil rights, labor, and women’s issues; as she demonstrates, activism and the desire to work for the common good run in her family. Her father was a labor attorney and environmentalist, and her mother, Ann Richards, was a fierce fighter for women’s rights who became governor of Texas. As a high school girl new to Austin (she was born in Waco), she made and wore a black arm band supporting the moratorium to end the Vietnam War. After graduation, she headed east to Brown University. She supported striking janitors and librarians, took a semester off to intern for the Project on the Status and Education of Women in Washington, D.C., and became a union organizer in New Orleans. There, she met and married labor organizer Kirk Adams and formed a family that has supported labor across the country ever since. After some time in Southern California, she went back to Texas to work for her mother’s campaign for governor, and she formed the Texas Freedom Network to fight against right-wing textbook censorship. Then it was off to Washington again to serve on Nancy Pelosi’s staff. The author sprinkles short asides throughout the book that alternate between genuinely instructional and boring—e.g., well-worn tips on work-life balance. However, the guidelines for starting any organization are spot-on: direct, down-to-earth, and highly practical. In 2006, Richards and her family moved to New York City so she could assume the lead role at Planned Parenthood in 2006, and she has made the organization instrumental in a wide variety of women’s-rights causes. In the past year, she has spent considerable time battling for her organization amid the Trump administration’s efforts to cut funding.
A memoir that makes palpable the immense influence of an organization that has improved so many women’s lives.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8759-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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