Kamala Harris - The Truths We Hold - Book Review

I had never heard of Kamala Harris until she announced that she was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.  Even then, I didn't pay any attention to her.  I didn't really take much notice of her until she gained public attention attacking Joe Biden in the last Democratic debate.  Then I thought I should read her book and find out more about her even I realize that books like hers, common amongst presidential hopefuls, are self-serving.

She grew up initially in Oakland, California and yes, she did ride a school bus for local integration purposes.  He father was an economist who taught at Stanford.  Her mother was a biologist who did cancer research.  Sadly, her mother with whom she was close, ended up dying from cancer.

In middle school she moved to Montreal with her mother, her parents having divorced, where she graduated from HS if I read correctly.  Strangely, she has little to say about her Montreal years.  She choose to attend college in Washington D.C. at Howard University, a famous HBC which Thurgood Marshall attended.

She came back to California and attended the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco.  I don't quite understand this law school.  It is connected to the "Univ. of California" which I assume means the university system.  She passed the California bar on her second attempt.  She started in the DA's office in Oakland and then served two terms as the Oakland DA.  She was elected to two terms as the California attorney general before being elected to the US Senate in 2016.  She doesn't tell how she came to run for the Senate which seems like a stretch from a distance.

She married in her 40's to a divorced man with two teenagers.  She gives the impression that she is the active mother of these kids rather than the biological mother even though they all get along.

Across the book Harris touches all of the progressive issues.  She comes across as a true-blue liberal. I do not know anyone anymore self-described liberal.  She likes to see herself as a doer rather than a talker.  What are her chances of getting the nomination?  I do not know.


"Years from now, our children and our grandchildren will look up and lock eyes with us. They will ask where we were when the stakes were so high. They will ask us what it was like. I don't want us to just tell them how we felt. I want us to tell them what we did."  P. 281