The Road Taken

March 1, 2022

Currently president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, Leahy gives us a sweeping view of U.S. politics as he tells his story as the country's longest-serving senator in The Road Taken (75,000-copy first printing). A leading light in film and television, also featured in four Broadway shows, Lewis (The Mother of Black Hollywood) recounts personal experiences encapsulating the vagaries of modern life while highlighting what she's learned about Walking in My Joy (125,00-copy first printing). In Deer Creek Drive, AWP Award-winning novelist/memoirist Lowry recalls the particularly vicious 1948 murder of society matron Idella Thompson near where she grew up in the solidly Jim Crow Mississippi Delta, with neighbors protesting the conviction of Thompson's daughter even though her claims about a fleeing Black man proved spurious. Proclaiming I'm Glad My Mom Died, actor/director McCurdy relates what it was like to be a child star (iCarly) wrestling with an eating disorder, addiction, and a controlling and aggressively ambitious mother (75,000-copy first printing). In a memoir rejecting the standard resilience trope, Nietfeld chronicles traversing a childhood encompassing a mother who put her on antipsychotics, icy foster care, Adderall addiction, and homelessness to arrive at Harvard, Big Tech, and Acceptance--crucially, of herself. Award-winning critic/novelist Tillman relates a life taken over by Mothercare after her mother was diagnosed with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (after several wrong assumptions), leading to seven surgeries, memory loss, and total dependence on her daughters.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2022
The longtime Vermont senator recounts a half-century of political service. In 1974, as an attorney with little political experience, Leahy (b. 1940), Catholic and liberal, became the first Democrat from his state to win a Senate seat, "much to the shock of the political establishment in Vermont." Methodical and scholarly, he arrived on Capitol Hill to take his place in a body that no longer exists, for better or worse. As he notes, for example, "former segregationists still held powerful gavels as chairmen--in my own caucus." Still, it was also the Senate that saw Barry Goldwater and other conservatives inform Richard Nixon that he needed to resign or face impeachment, the Senate in which hardcore Republican Trent Lott could cross the aisle to work out deals with his Democratic colleagues out of respect for the institution. No such luck today. As Leahy writes, "[Ted] Cruz, the Texas Republican, had an uncanny ability to snatch any right-leaning, hyperpartisan political opportunity from the jaws of reality," while he pegs Mitch McConnell as an opportunist who traded away his respect for the institution, like so many other Republicans, out of fear of his Trumpian constituents. Solidly liberal, the author recounts some of the thornier moments of his tenure, as when he helped negotiate the custody case of Eli�n Gonzalez, whose father wanted to return him to his native Cuba. Leahy, who'd forged a more or less friendly relationship with Fidel Castro, secured a promise from the Cuban leader to tamp down any nationalistic celebrations to save the Clinton administration embarrassment. "Castro kept his word," writes the author. "There was no parade for Eli�n along the embarcadero in Old Havana." When Castro can be trusted but Josh Hawley not, then it becomes understandable why Leahy has chosen not to run for a new term--and why he's quite evidently glad to leave Washington behind. A skillfully spun memoir that shows how politics is--or at least should be--conducted.

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