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Summary
Summary
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works--and really doesn't--in A Fighting Chance
As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher--an ambitious goal, given her family's modest means. Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put even that dream out of reach, but fifteen years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the phone call that changed her life: could she come to Washington DC to help advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcylaws?
Thus began an impolite education into the bare-knuckled, often dysfunctional ways of Washington. She fought for better bankruptcy laws for ten years and lost. She tried to hold the federal government accountable during the financial crisis but became a target of the big banks. She came up with the idea for a new agency designed to protect consumers from predatory bankers and was denied the opportunity to run it. Finally, at age 62, she decided to run for elective office and won the most competitive--and watched--Senate race in the country.
In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class--and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America's government can and must do better for working families.
Author Notes
Elizabeth Warren worked as an elementary school teacher, a lawyer, and a law professor at Harvard University. She is the senior senator from Massachusetts.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, she served as Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Her efforts to protect taxpayers, to hold Wall Street accountable, and to ensure tough oversight of both the Bush and Obama Administrations won praise from both sides of the aisle. The Boston Globe named her Bostonian of the Year in 2009 for her oversight efforts. She helped created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
She is also the author of numerous books including All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, and A Fighting Chance.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Warren, a rising star in progressive political circles who parlayed her decades of work as a legal scholar with a focus on consumer rights into a successful run for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, offers a fiery stump-speech style of delivery, in keeping with her populist persona. Even though she downplays her celebrity status and confesses to having serious stage fright during her initial national media appearances, Warren possesses a graceful ease in the recording booth. Her narration conveys the poise of an accomplished attorney and Harvard professor and the humble frankness of her working-class roots. Warren's colloquialisms-e.g., "hurrican' "-seem to flow naturally, without any hint of affectation. She doesn't shy away from a tone of righteous anger, particularly when it comes to lobbying by the banking industry. Nor is Warren afraid raise her voice as she names the leaders with whom she has butted heads. But she also makes a point to temper that emotion with touches of humility and humor. A Metropolitan hardcover. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Warren gained national notoriety during her tenure on the commission to study the financial crisis, leading to creation of the consumer finance agency she headed briefly. In this engaging memoir, she recalls her journey from a childhood of struggle in Oklahoma City to success in academia and politics and laments the lack of chances for others to work hard and achieve their own versions of success. Warren recalls an early marriage, struggling to raise young children as she moved from a career as a teacher to law school to teaching law. She was so agitated by the unfairness of bankruptcy law that she wrote books about it and used her professorship at Harvard as a platform, eventually launching herself into a career in Washington. Armed with stories and statistics about how bankruptcy and predatory banking practices affected middle-class families, Warren lobbied hard for change. She offers a behind-the-scenes look at the political deal-making and head-butting machinations in efforts to restore the nation's financial system after the mortgage debacle. Warren recalls negotiations with political figures from Senator Ted Kennedy to President Obama as well as her hard-fought campaign to unseat Scott Brown as U.S. senator from Massachusetts. This is a passionate memoir of one woman's personal story and the larger story of corruption in financial circles and the need for reform that balances the interests of the American middle class against those of the corporate sector. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The senior senator from Massachusetts and former Harvard law professor here gives the backstory on her fight for the middle class in a memoir that is sure to attract interest beyond the book-review section.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, on Connecticut Avenue not far from the White House, I passed a crowd of 20-somethings wearing distressed denim and hoodies. They looked more Williamsburg than Washington and carried placards that read: "I'm from the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party." I happened to be headed to a source lunch to discuss Hillary Rodham Clinton's potential 2016 candidacy, and the activists seemed straight out of central casting, planted there by the same progressives who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and are determined to find a 2016 contender to run against Clinton. Warren, the 64-year-old Massachusetts senator described by one reporter as "a strand of pearls short of looking like the head of the P.T.A.," is not, however, out of central casting. A professor who spent most of her career teaching law students about bankruptcy, Warren is an unlikely icon for the Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing set. She didn't run for elected office until 2011; the following year, she defeated the Republican Scott Brown to capture the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy. By the time she was prodded into running, Warren had been turned off by Washington, and her favorite activities were walking Otis, her slobbery and obese golden retriever; knocking back fried clams and beer with her husband, the legal historian Bruce Mann; and visiting her three grandchildren in California. Or, at least, that's the narrative she lays out in a relatable, folksy voice in "A Fighting Chance." The book is a potent mix of memoir and policy that makes politics seem like a necessary evil, and yet it's impossible to read Warren's story without thinking about her meteoric rise in the Democratic Party and those Warren groupies on Connecticut Avenue. That makes the aw-shucks, I-just-stumbled-into-the-Senate anecdotes that propel her narrative feel inevitably like the savvy (critics would say self-serving) story lines that would play so well at an Elks Club in Iowa. Warren writes that before the 2012 campaign, the most fund-raising experience she had was a "ferocious effort" to help her daughter's Brownie troop sell cookies. Her campaign went on to raise $42 million, setting a 2012 Senate fundraising record, mostly from small donations. Add lines like "America's middle class is under attack," "The game is deliberately rigged" and "Politics so often felt dirty to me," and the book seems written by someone with bigger ambitions than taking the grandkids to Legoland. These are the flash points, after all, that have become central to the Democratic Party and a White House grappling with how to address income inequality. The anti-Wall Street sentiment for which Warren is the poster girl led to the Occupy Wall Street movement and helped elect Bill de Blasio as the mayor of New York. (Warren has said she will not run for president, and she doesn't discuss the 2016 election in her book.) TALKING POINTS ASIDE, a politician's personal story is a powerful currency, especially when it starts with a lower-middle-class childhood in Oklahoma City and features characters like wise old Aunt Bee and salt-of-the-earth Daddy, who lost his job selling carpeting at Montgomery Ward. (Warren writes about how "everyone on our mother's side... talked openly about their Native American ancestry," and she says she was "stunned" when Republicans called her a "Fauxcahontas": "Knowing who you are is one thing, and proving who you are is another.") When recounting how her political career took off, Warren spends more time on the intricate ticktock behind the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau than on her personal life, perhaps because she didn't have much of one in those years. But it's the intimate moments in "A Fighting Chance" that make up its less wonky and infinitely more readable parts. We see Warren as a girl, watching her 50-year-old mother cry as she tried to zip up a too-tight black dress; she had an interview for a job answering phones at Sears, Roebuck to help keep the family from losing its small house in a good school district. Refreshingly, Warren rarely dwells on her gender (though she does poke fun at an Obama adviser's suggestion she be the C.F.P.B.'s "cheerleader"). But like many women of her generation, she felt stifled in the 1970 s as a young wife and mother to two children, Amelia and Alex. It was in the kitchen one night, after she'd put both kids to bed, that Warren - called "Betsy" by friends and family - looked over at her first husband, Jim, smoking a cigarette as she cleaned up. She asked if he wanted a divorce. "No hesitation, just yes. He moved out the next weekend." Three decades later, Betsy was a Harvard law professor and talking with a political operative as she contemplated a run for the Senate. She began to tell him that her first husband had died in 2003. "Before I could take a breath and explain about Jim's terrible illness, ... about the blow to Amelia and Alex, about how he never had the chance to know his beautiful grandchildren - the research guy shouted 'Great!'" In political terms, a deceased ex-husband is better than a living one. That's the sharp-elbowed world Warren says she never thought she'd be a part of. "I never expected to run for office - but then again, I never expected to do a lot of things in my life," she writes. "I never expected to meet the president of the United States. I never expected to be a blonde." But a prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention (right before Bill Clinton) and a seat in the Senate don't happen willy-nilly, and Warren is far from a passive observer. Before she ran for office, she had become a leading expert in debates about predatory lending practices and bankruptcy legislation, as well as a thorn in the financial industry's side. The idea that some banks are too big to fail, Warren writes in "A Fighting Chance," "allows the megabanks to operate like drunks on a wild weekend in Vegas." Families who fall behind on their debts are usually "desperately ashamed of their situation," and have been saddled with health care costs or tricked into taking out subprime mortgages with egregious terms hidden in the fine print. That message first brought Warren national attention with her 2003 book, "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke," written with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. In that book, they wrote about a meeting with Hillary Clinton in 1998 to discuss bankruptcy protections for struggling middle-class families. (Before Warren began her pitch the first lady "snapped her head sharply to the side and called to no one in particular, 'Where's lunch? I'm hungry.'") The authors go on to criticize Clinton's coziness to Wall Street as a New York senator. There's hardly any mention of Clinton in "A Fighting Chance." WARREN MOSTLY AVOIDS the overheated rhetoric associated with some well-heeled progressives; her vernacular is more Nick at Nite than The Nation. After Barney Frank said he would include the C.F.P.B. in the Dodd-Frank reform package, Warren thought, "Wowee-zowee! It was a cartwheel moment." An invitation from the White House arrived while she was in Oklahoma, and she rushed to the local mall to buy the first department-store suit she could find. "Holy cow - the White House! A presidential announcement!" She nagged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to buckle his seatbelt, imitated the Three Stooges with Obama and Geithner before stepping into the Rose Garden, and vomited from nerves backstage at "The Daily Show." For all her humble goofiness, the title of this book reminds us that this is about Warren's fight. She is still the fiery advocate who called for a bureau to protect consumers or, as a second choice, "no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor." And she lit up both political parties in 2011 when she said, at a campaign stop, "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own." Not even stories about rocking a grandbaby to sleep or baking Sunday-school treats could soften that. Warren is an unlikely icon for the Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing set. AMY CHOZICK is a national political correspondent for The Times.
Kirkus Review
In this engaging memoir, Massachusetts Sen. Warren (co-author: All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, 2005, etc.) introduces her family and recounts the battles that shaped her career as a teacher and politician.Educated as a specialist in contract law, the author reshaped her career to become one of the country's leading experts in bankruptcy after the law was amended in 1981. Seeking to understand why people were going bankrupt in increasing numbers, Warren began to accumulate evidence contradicting the orthodox view that people seeking protection from creditors via the bankruptcy courts were deadbeats "who existed at the economic margins and would always be there." She began to understand that bankruptcy was affecting ordinary middle-class people who found themselves unable to face the financial consequences of job loss, sickness or other personal catastrophes. These elements resonated within her own family: Her father lost his job and suffered repeated sicknesses, and her grandchildren have ongoing health issues. Warren pushed further to identify how credit-issuing institutions were taking advantage of consumers in manipulative ways. The expertise she developed led to a request for her to join the staff of a presidential commission on bankruptcy in 1995. The author uses her legal background, political knowledge gained from a succession of appointments involving bankruptcy law, an investigation into the financial crisis of 2008, and her proposal for a Consumer Finance Agency to provide intriguingly detailed information about the politics of bankruptcy, banking and credit. She introduces leading figures with whom her career has intersected, including Sen. Edward Kennedy and Congressman Barney Frank, and she shows how her continuing concerns with the financial plight of the middle class shaped her approach to the battles she felt called to fight. The book also covers her Massachusetts senatorial campaign.A frankly partisan memoir that provides shrewd insights into both national politics and the state of the middle class. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Senator Warren's (Prosperity, Peace, Respect) latest book, her fifth, is a memoir that provides an accessible and intriguing look into some of the most important domestic political issues of the past decade and the related maneuvering, negotiation, and political machinations of Washington. Warren makes a strong case that the story behind these issues, mostly related to financial regulation, should interest all Americans, regardless of political affiliation. In the beginning of the book, listeners will hear the story of her early life, both her blue-collar roots and her education, but Warren hits her stride and seems especially to enjoy the storytelling once she comes to the battles that have pulled her into a political career. The author comes across as humble and unapologetically down-home but also fierce and savvy, in spite of her outsider status in our nation's capital. Her political narrative relating her start in politics to her participation in the creation of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is straightforward without being dumbed down. The personal elements of her history are at times genuinely moving, as when she talks about her relationship with her father and her mother's return to work after the family suffered financial setbacks. Warren herself reads, which lends warmth, liveliness, and passion to her writing. If her political career and influence continue to expand, as many expect it to, this memoir's already considerable appeal will only increase. -VERDICT Consider strongly for all libraries. ["Lay readers and business students who need to understand how banking and lending regulation and legislation are enacted will appreciate the personal stories Warren uses to demonstrate the problems borrowers encounter, the solutions she worked for, and the disappointments she met along the way," read the review of the Metropolitan hc, LJ 5/15/14.]-Heather -Malcolm, Bow, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue A Fighting Chance I'm Elizabeth Warren. I'm a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. For nearly all my life, I would have said I'm a teacher, but I guess I really can't say that anymore. Now I'd have to introduce myself as a United States senator, though I still feel a small jolt of surprise whenever I say that. This is my story, and it's a story born of gratitude. My daddy was a maintenance man and my mother worked the phones at Sears. More than anything, my parents wanted to give my three older brothers and me a future. And all four of us have lived good lives. My oldest brother, Don Reed, served twenty years in the military, with 288 combat missions in Vietnam to his credit. In good years, my brother John had a union job operating a crane, and in leaner years he took whatever construction work he could get. My brother David had a special spark; he started his own business, and when that didn't work out, he started another business, because he couldn't imagine a world where he wasn't living by his wits every day. I went to college and became a teacher, first for special-needs kids and then for law students; only much later did I get involved in politics. My brothers and I all married and had children, and my parents plastered their walls, their refrigerator, and their tabletops with pictures of their much-loved grandchildren. I will be grateful to my mother and daddy until the day I die. They worked hard--really hard--to help my brothers and me along. But we also succeeded, at least in part, because we were lucky enough to grow up in an America that invested in kids like us and helped build a future where we could flourish. Here's the hard truth: America isn't building that kind of future any longer. Today the game is rigged--rigged to work for those who have money and power. Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor. Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they'll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children. Over the past generation, America's determination to give every kid access to affordable college or technical training has faded. The basic infrastructure that helps us build thriving businesses and jobs--the roads, bridges, and power grids--has crumbled. The scientific and medical research that has sparked miraculous cures and inventions from the Internet to nanotechnology is starved for funding, and the research pipeline is shrinking. The optimism that defines us as a people has been beaten and bruised. It doesn't have to be this way. I am determined--fiercely determined--to do everything I can to help us once again be the America that creates opportunities for anyone who works hard and plays by the rules. An America of accountability and fair play. An America that builds a future for not just some of our children but for all of our children. An America where everyone gets what I got: a fighting chance. My story seems pretty unlikely, even to me. I never expected to run for office--but then again, I never expected to do a lot of things in my life. I never expected to climb a mountain. I never expected to meet the president of the United States. I never expected to be a blonde. But here I am. The story starts in Oklahoma, where I grew up, and it tumbles through a life built around husbands and babies and setting the kitchen on fire. I made my way to a commuter college, a teaching job, a public law school, and, eventually, a professorship. As I started weaving in academic research, I became more and more worried about what was happening to America's families, and the story shifted to Washington, where I picked my first public fight. In 1995, I agreed to take on what I thought would be some part-time public service for a couple of years, and I quickly got caught up in a battle over our nation's bankruptcy law. I know that sounds a little obscure, but underneath it was a clash about whether our government exists to serve giant banks or struggling families. The battle lasted much longer than I'd expected--a full ten years, in fact. My own life threaded through, of course, with graduations and funerals and grandchildren of my own. When that battle ended, I picked up another, and then another and another--a total of five big fights in all. They ranged from fighting for a fresh start for families who had suffered a job loss or a serious illness, to trying to force the government to be transparent about what was really going on with the bank bailout, to tangling with the big banks over dishonest mortgages. But the way I see it, even as they took me this way and that, all five battles were about a single, deeper threat: America's middle class is under attack. Worse, it's not under attack by some unstoppable force of nature. It's in trouble because the game is deliberately rigged. This book tells a very public story about fraud and bailouts and elections. It also tells a very personal story about mothers and daughters, day care and dogs, aging parents and cranky toddlers. It's not meant to be a definitive account of any historical event--it's just what I saw and what I lived. It's also a story about losing, learning, and getting stronger along the way. It's a story about what's worth fighting for, and how sometimes, even when we fight against very powerful opponents, we can win. I never expected to go to Washington. Heck, for the most part I never even wanted to go. But I'm here to fight for something that I believe is worth absolutely everything: to give each one of our kids a fighting chance to build a future full of promise and discovery. Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Warren Excerpted from A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue: A Fighting Chance | p. 1 |
1 Choosing Battles | p. 5 |
2 The Bankruptcy Wars | p. 48 |
3 Bailing Out the Wrong People | p. 83 |
4 What $1 Million a Day Can Buy | p. 127 |
5 An Agency for the People | p. 164 |
6 The Battle for the Senate | p. 208 |
Epilogue: Fighting Again... and Again | p. 273 |
Notes | p. 279 |
Acknowledgments | p. 337 |
Index | p. 347 |