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Putnam
May 2008
On Sale: May 1, 2008
304 pages ISBN: 039915499X EAN: 9780399154997 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
One of the remarkable books of this season— a tough,
plainspoken, deeply passionate narrative by one of our most
important national figures. We all know them: politicians’ books that read as if
they’ve been cobbled together from old speeches. The Good
Fight is as far from that as it is possible to get. In a voice that is flinty, real, and passion-filled,
Senator Harry Reid tells the tale of two places,
intertwining his own story, particularly his early life of
deep poverty in the tiny mining town of Searchlight, Nevada—
“a place that boasted of thirteen brothels and no churches”—
with the cautionary tale of Washington, D.C.: “If I can do
nothing greater in this book than explain those two places
to each other, then I will have done something important.” Reid is inspired by obstacles. Brought up in a cabin
without indoor plumbing, he hitchhiked forty-five miles
across open desert to high school. He worked full-time as a
Capitol Hill policeman to get through law school, after the
school refused him financial aid, telling him he wasn’t cut
out to be a lawyer. As head of the Nevada Gaming
Commission, he led an unrelenting fight to clean up Las
Vegas, despite four years of death threats —and much worse.
And in Congress, Reid’s spent more than twenty-five years
battling those who would take the country in the wrong
direction: “The radical ideologues degrade our government,
so much so that when they are in charge of it, they do not
know how to run it.” And, always, it all comes back to Searchlight: “Who I am
now, and what I am doing now, began in that town, with
those people, in those mines.” This book is the story of a
man who knows what a good fight is, because he has had to
fight like hell for everything his whole life. It is
populated by a rich and raucous cast of great and failed
men, eccentrics, visionaries, gangsters, and presidents who
make up his life and times. And it is for all those who not
only like a good story, but wonder what we should do now in
America.
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