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Summary
Summary
As the co-host of MSNBC's popular morning show Morning Joe , Mika Brzezinski has established herself a leading political news journalist and beloved television personality. She daily interviews world leaders--Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain--and discusses the major events of the day with guests like Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, Maureen Dowd, and Tom Friedman.
But success hasn't always come easy for Mika. Growing up the only daughter of a former National Security Advisor, she struggled to find an identity in a family of over-achievers. She found her dream job early on and was hailed as the "It Girl" of CBS, only to be fired just a few short years later. After an unsuccessful stint as a stay-at-home mom, Mika went back to the workplace with encouragement from her 8-year-old daughter. She took a job that seemed a long-shot at best, and against all odds achieved the greatest success of her career. Now, in a time when many women are losing their jobs or struggling to find the perfect balance between work and home, Mika guides women of all ages to a place where they can find peace and fulfillment in their lives.
All Things at Once is a motivational book aimed at women, based on Mika's own personal and professional triumphs and failures--all of which have led her to her current position as one of television's most outspoken and respected journalists. Blending the personal with the prescriptive, Brzezinski's book will address the perpetual question of "having it all" when it comes to work and family; the importance of remaining equally humble in the face of great success and seemingly devastating setbacks; as well as the necessity of knowing and embracing our limitations so that we may transcend them.
In the tradition of Gail Sheehy's classic Passages , this illuminating book shows women how to reach their full potential in all areas of life, and at every stage of their journey. Readers will recognize their friends, their mothers, their daughters, and themselves in this refreshingly honest memoir.
Author Notes
Mika Brzeznski is a co-host of Morning Joe and co-host of The Joe Scarborough Show with Mika Brzezinski , a national radio program distributed by Citadel Media.
Prior to joining MSNBC, Brzezinski was an anchor of the CBS Evening News Weekend Edition and a CBS News correspondent who frequently contributed to CBS Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes . In September 2001, she became CBS's principal "Ground Zero" reporter for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
She is the daughter of former National Security Advisor and foreign policy expert Zbigniew Brzezinski. She is the mother of two children, and has been married for 15 years to a journalist at ABC.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her second year as cohost of MSNBC's Morning Joe, TV news veteran Brzezinski is on fire, after enduring her share of professional setbacks and personal hardships. In this straightforward, frank account of her career trajectory, Brzezinski, the daughter of President Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, does not bother to disguise her hard-fought ambition to secure a top news anchor position or hide the fact that she is not satisfied (nor very good at) being a stay-at-home mom of two daughters. From the beginning of her TV career, working her way up at local affiliates in Hartford, to her big break, getting hired in 1997 for an overnight CBS network anchor program in New York, Up to the Minute, the author resolved to make the frantic pace work, despite the increasing toll the late hours and absences from her family were taking. Distracted, pressured to return too early to work after the birth of her second child and exhausted, she took a bad fall down the stairs of her Yonkers home while holding her infant. The trauma scared her into slowing down, but not for long. Opportunity has seasoned Brzezinski but not hardened her, and having found her venue and voice with Morning Joe, she shares a refreshingly pragmatic approach for the professional woman: don't wait to have children and don't let your job treat you like a bad boyfriend. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Having It All, the title of the modern Superwoman's to-do list, implies a sequential mastery of the tasks at hand. Career? Check. Husband? Check. Kids? Check. Yet instead of accomplishing her life's goals one at a time, Brzezinski managed to juggle them more or less simultaneously. Occasionally, however, something came crashing down, and it was one such literal fall down a flight of stairs with her four-month-old daughter in her arms that caused the bright young star of broadcast journalism to rethink her priorities. From her days as a cub reporter in a small New England TV station to high-profile anchor responsibilities with CBS and MSNBC, Brzezinski's career frequently fell prey to network politics, causing her ability to simultaneously function as a committed wife and mother to suffer as a result. Filled with as much self-deprecating candor as self-congratulatory bromides, Brzezinski and coauthor Paisner nonetheless offer a realistically detailed portrait of the pitfalls to be avoided on one's professional and personal paths to success.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN did you first become aware of Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of MSNBC's daily news discussion program "Morning Joe"? For the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, it was in the 1970s, when she spilled a plate of caviar on his lap. For me, it was a December morning in 2007, as I listened to the Carter-era statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski discussing Benazir Bhutto's assassination. The anchorwoman addressed him as "Daddy." Daddy? I looked up from my pancakes. But for four million YouTube viewers and countless others, the Mika moment came half a year earlier, in June 2007 -early in the "Morning Joe" run - when Brzezinski refused to lead the news roundup with a report on Paris Hilton. She tried to light the script on fire, then to tear it up; finally she put it through a shredder. It was, a fan e-mailed, "the shred heard around the world." Who was this rebel on the news desk? How had she ended up on Joe Scarborough's program? And why hadn't this newswoman - possessed of clear charisma and ability - had a more visible public profile before? Brzezinski's memoir, "All Things at Once," written with Daniel Paisner, explains both the unusual circumstances of her childhood and her struggle to build a career in television media while raising a family. Brzezinski married the investigative reporter Jim Hoffer when the two were fledgling reporters in Connecticut. About five years later, "zipping around like a wild windup toy" as she juggled a job on the overnight shift at CBS with the needs of their toddler and their 4-month-old, she fell down a staircase while holding the newborn. The baby broke a femur in the fall and went into shock. With devastating candor, Brzezinski describes her terror as she awaited the doctors' prognosis. (The child made a complete recovery.) "How could I have let myself get so run-down, so exhausted at work that I would fumble over my own feet and fall down a steep flight of stairs with my newborn in my arms?" she writes. It's a question that has no answer, but which is asked, in infinite permutations, by all women who shoulder the triple load of motherhood, career and guilt. "All Things at Once" follows Brzezinski through her professional chutes and ladders - the freelance gigs, the graveyard shifts, the drama (covering 9/11), the dreariness (puff segments on shoes) - the only constant being the precariousness of her employment. In 2006, on her 39th birthday, she was abruptly and "arbitrarily" fired from CBS. Her stunned reaction was to quit the work force and become a full-time mother. But soon after opting out, she found her younger daughter, then 8, sitting on the floor in a "knees-up fetal position," distressed over her mother's lost career. She decided, she writes, that "it was important for them to see me fail and then come out the other side." TURNING down an offer for a grueling full-time-plus position at ABC, she took a part-time job at MSNBC that gave her flexibility. It was there that Joe Scarborough bumped into her in 2007 and drafted her to be his sidekick on "Morning Joe." Scarborough is a conservative Republican, of course, while Brzezinski's politics are more liberal; but he liked her professionalism and her "snarkiness." Now the two bicker like an old - and very well-informed - married couple over the headlines every day, their lively pushback waking their breakfast audience before the coffee's even brewed. Brzezinski writes that having joined "Morning Joe," she felt at age 40 as if "I was back at the Brzezinski family dinner table, fighting to make myself heard. . . . It was exactly where I belonged." She became, she says, "Mother, wife, journalist. All things at once." Brzezinski's questioning will be familiar to all women who shoulder the triple load of career, motherhood and guilt. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
The MSNBC personality writes about her roller-coaster career in TV news. Since 2007, Brzezinski has gained notoriety as Joe Scarborough's moderate sidekick on Morning Joe, but her defining moment as a journalist came, ironically, during June that year, when Paris Hilton was released from jail. Asked repeatedly to deliver that bit of infotainment as the lead headline, Brzezinski refused and promptly hopped off her anchor's chair and shredded the story. How she reached the point of such gutsy on-air defiance is the main subject of her memoir. "My one abiding thought," she writes, "was, Look, I'm forty years old, and I've been doing this a long time, and I can't pretend that this is newsI thought, You know what? Fire me. Go ahead. Like I'm scared of that happening again. And underneath that thought was another: This feels good." The youngest of three siblings, Brzezinski grew up in the charmed shadow of her famous parents, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and Emilie Benes Brzezinski, an accomplished sculptor. Though the author says that her familial role was often that of "keeping the conversation going," an important early lesson she learned from her mother and grandmother was that she could accomplish anything. Her ambition set her on the road to a major anchoring job, finding the right husband and raising children. Along the way, when she rose to the top at CBS News only to be fired and end up unemployed for more than a year, Brzezinski says the lesson she has gleaned is "pace yourself." While the author seeks to advise women on negotiating the charged family-career divide, the most memorable moments are those in which Brzezinski simply tells her story, displaying her struggles and achievements as a journalist, wife and mother. An intriguing account sure to interest working women and news junkies alike. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Cold Open: October 30, 1998-Yonkers, New York | p. xiii |
| Intro: Sometimes You Have to Take a Step Back | p. 1 |
| 1 The Secret Shapes of Trees | p. 13 |
| 2 Adventures in Television | p. 45 |
| 3 Up to the Minute | p. 65 |
| 4 Falling | p. 93 |
| 5 Turning the Page | p. 117 |
| 6 Blink of an Eye | p. 143 |
| 7 Lost... and Found | p. 177 |
| 8 The Biggest Step Back of All | p. 197 |
| 9 Finding My Voice | p. 217 |
