A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life - Hardcover

Patrick, Governor Deval

 
9780767931120: A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767931122 ISBN 13: 9780767931120
Verlag: Crown, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Deval Patrick, “an inspirational figure guided by optimism and hope who presaged the rise of President Obama” (The Boston Globe), recounts his extraordinary journey from the South Side of Chicago to the governorship of Massachusetts.
 
“I’ve simply seen too much goodness in this country—and have come so far in my own journey—not to believe in those ideals, and my faith in the future is sometimes restored under the darkest clouds.”—Governor Deval Patrick

In January 2007, Deval Patrick became the first black governor of the state of Massachusetts, one of only two black governors elected in American history. But that was just one triumphant step in an improbable life that began in a poor tenement on the South Side of Chicago, taking Patrick from a chaotic childhood to an elite boarding school in New England, from a sojourn doing relief work in Africa to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and then to a career in politics.
 
In this heartfelt and inspiring memoir, he pays tribute to the family, friends, and strangers who, through words and deeds, have instilled in him transcendent lessons of faith, perseverance, and friendship. In doing so, he reminds us of the power of community and the imperative of idealism. With humility, humor, and grace, he offers a road map for attaining happiness, empowerment, and success while also making an appeal for readers to cultivate those achievements in others, to feel a greater stake in this world, and to shape a life worth living.

Warm, nostalgic, and inspirational, A Reason to Believe is destined to become a timeless tribute to a uniquely American odyssey and a testament to what is possible in our lives and our communities if we are hopeful, generous, and resilient.

Governor Deval Patrick is donating a portion of the proceeds from A Reason to Believe to A Better Chance, a national organization dedicated to opening the doors to greater educational opportunities for young people of color.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Governor Deval Patrick was the governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015. He was born in Chicago in 1956. After junior high school, he received a scholarship to attend Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and from there he graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He has worked as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and was later appointed, by President Clinton, as the assistant attorney general for civil rights. Governor Patrick has also been general counsel at Texaco and Coca-Cola.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

VISION IS ESSENTIAL

In 1999, in a weekly meeting of the five most senior executives at Texaco, our boss, the chief executive officer, asked whether the company lacked vision. The global energy industry was in the midst of great consolidation, with legendary giants merging and famous brands disappearing. I was a relative newcomer to this world, and it felt like a game of billion-dollar musical chairs played around the circular table of a plush, walnut-paneled conference room. We sensed we were losing, and I was surprised by the muffled response to the boss's question. If there was a vision for the company beyond just making money, no one in that room knew what it was.

The moment resonated with me for a different reason. According to scripture, "Without a vision, the people will perish." I knew that lesson well.

Growing up with no money, I knew my family had a simple vision: to no longer be broke. Though we occasionally lived from hand to mouth, my grandmother hated for us to describe ourselves as poor. "We're broke," she declared. "Broke is temporary." Splitting rhetorical hairs seemed odd when we were hungry. But my grandmother's message conveyed a much larger truth, especially in that place and in those times. She taught us to imagine a life that was better than or different from our own and then to work for it.

The South Side of Chicago was like a small southern town in the 1950s and '60s. Many of the inhabitants were recent arrivals from "down home," as they called it-the cotton fields of Mississippi and Georgia, the tobacco fields of the Carolinas, or the railroad yards of Arkansas and Louisiana.

People spoke like southerners, with a lyrical quality to their speech. Subjects and verbs rarely agreed, and sentences had the rhythm and pace of the South. Everyone communicated by telling stories, often allegorical, never hurried. The old folks quoted scripture freely and from memory. My grandma Sally's favorite was the Ninety-first Psalm, which she summoned when she was stressed: "For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone." The elderly also carried themselves with a courtliness that belied their lack of formal education and proper English. You were expected to greet others on the street with "good morning" or "good afternoon." Kids addressed adults as "sir" or "ma'am."

Scowling down on us were the infamous Robert Taylor Homes, a miles- long stretch of identical seventeen-story "projects," which would become synonymous with the public housing woes of urban America. But most people I knew lived in two- and three-story tenements, with an apartment or two on each floor. There was block after block of these squat, solid-looking brick or frame buildings, with rickety railings, chipped concrete steps, and porches whose boards needed replacing. Clotheslines were strung across postage-stamp backyards or connected to back porches from separate buildings. A few families kept chickens in a backyard coop for eggs and meat. The front stoops, with their folding lawn chairs, drew neighbors

outside on summer evenings. Churches and schools provided stability.

The stockyards, where cattle and pigs were brought from the Great Plains for slaughter, were a short bus ride away. You could smell the stench in our neighborhood when the wind was right. In the summer, a horse-drawn wagon cruised our streets, the fresh fruit arrayed on a bed of hay and the driver yodeling "Watermelons!" to attract his customers. On those same roads limped a menacing man with a misaligned eye who pushed a crude wooden cart on bicycle tires, offering to sharpen knives on a stone that screeched when it spun.

Much of life seemed to center on food-getting it, preparing it, doing without it. Tiny, makeshift gardens miraculously yielded collard greens, tomatoes, and pole beans. Great pots of greens with ham hocks or fatback simmered all day long on small apartment ranges. Black cast-iron skillets sizzled with porgies or fish that were caught in Lake Michigan or even the Washington Park lagoons, gutted and scaled, rolled in cornmeal, and fried in bacon fat, the latter rendered from many a breakfast and kept in an old coffee can on the stove. Cornbread, easy, cheap, and filling, was served with everything. Whatever was for dinner, it was considered bad form not to offer something to a neighborhood kid who was hungry. And in that neighborhood, someone was always hungry. The smells were full of flavor and anticipation with one outstanding exception. When someone was cooking chitterlings-pig intestines stewed for hours in broth-the stink drove out all bystanders.

My earliest impressions of my parents were of a stern father who always seemed to be observing us critically, and from a distance, and a brooding mother who would lie in bed for hours, smoking silently and staring off in dark, deep thought. They seemed to have negotiated their way into their marriage. In an exhange of letters within days in 1954, they communicated both a hunger for and skepticism about each other and their future. He wrote: "If your choice matches mine, we match. I can show you but don't intend to make you see it if you don't want to. On the other hand, if you do agree, you've got a mate."

She replied, "I have a great affection for you, and feel we could make it together. I hope and will do the best I can not to be selfish as far as this is concerned. I want to give as much to you as you have given to me."

My father, Pat, was a jazz musician, and as this letter suggests, he seemed to have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about their relationship. It would be on his terms, period. His greatest and first love was music. My mother, Emily, appears to have felt chronically misunderstood and responded favorably to his insights about her. An ardent romance it wasn't.

But they tied the knot, and soon afterward, in August 1955, my sister, Rhonda, was born. I followed a short eleven months later, in July 1956. When I was born, the four of us lived in a basement apartment at 79th and Calumet, and there's a favorite family photograph of me sitting on my father's shoulders outside that apartment when I was two or three years old. I have vague recollections of living there, of being bounced around by my father in that apartment. I have a vivid memory of him pouring milk on my sister's head at the kitchen table one night when he got upset with her. I thought it funny at the time.

Any sense I had of contented family life came to a jarring end when my father decided to leave and move to New York when I was four. I knew nothing of the tensions. My mother, who had dropped out of high school to pursue him, hoped he would return, a hope she nourished by sending him letters regularly. "We all love you very much, and are trying to understand you," she wrote. "Try and do the same for us." When Chubby Checker became a sensation, she wrote, "The kids have gotten so they twist on everything; every kind of beat." She would include little notes from us in her letters. Rhonda's penmanship was remarkably clear at age five or six. Mine was horrible.

My father sent some money once or twice a year, and the landlord was kind about waiving the rent for months at a time. But our finances went from tenuous to desperate, and we had to move. We were offered an apartment in the new Robert Taylor Homes, but my mother could not bring herself to live there, still hoping, I think, for her husband's return.

There would be no reconciliation. My mother tried to make it on her own for a few years, mostly with the help of welfare, but feeling lonesome and needing help, she moved us into her parents' apartment on Wabash Avenue. Since we spent so much time there anyway and I adored my Gram and Poppy, I thought this was a great idea. Little...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767931122
ISBN 13 
9780767931120
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780767931137: A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0767931130 ISBN 13:  9780767931137
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2012
Softcover