I rate this 4.5 stars.
There is an honesty to this book.
It is not as cleanly composed and perfectly laid out as a novelist might have constructed it. There are breaks and gaps which affect developmental continuity.
But it is an amazing recollection of a youth subjected to much adversity, written by that youth in his middle age.
Kucinich takes us on a journey of remembrance of some very tough times as he processed them, with enough dirt and grit to keep it fairly true to how it must have been. As a member of US Congress, and a past and probable future presidential candidate, there had to be some constraint in not being even more graphically detailed in his history. He's not to be faulted in this --- political opponents twist and use anything they can, and had he given them additional ammunition it would only be to his detriment. So, the book pulls some punches. He still reveals some of his youthful indiscretions, enough that we get a taste of an additional reality too sordid for full disclosure.
What emerges is a sense of the forces that helped form the present Representative from Ohio: his egalitarian sympathy, of the need to support those who are bottom dwellers from the predations of the uncaring rich, of fairness, of striving to change the system to lessen suffering, and to level the playing field.
The book takes us through his earliest memories up to his twenty-first year, and the start of his political career. The gaps in story and the fits and starts brokenness of continuity create for the reader the feeling that his life had such disconnection. As it did : as he described it for Studs Terkel, it was an ethnic "Grapes of Wrath." His father's family had thirteen children, his mother's twelve, and he was the eldest of seven children in his own family. Everpresent poverty, and lack of material necessities (like a roof and floor) dangerously blended with the effects of alcohol and domestic abuse to create the least safe environment for children. The struggle of his mother and father and family is in many ways the longheld classic struggle of a great percentage of disenfranchised immigrants to America. Very tough conditions. Not always an easy read.
But it also defines Kucinich as one of the very few ranking politicos in America who came through such poverty.
His writing style reflects the memory process. . . it is a purposeful utility to take the reader back into their own earliest childhood. I thought these first sections of the book quite good, in fact, reminiscent to me of some of the prose of Dylan Thomas. There are a few times when his writing moves with a more artistic flair, such as when he describes the "symphony" of the sounds of Cleveland, the sounds one would have heard in any industrial center. Suffice it to say that it is NOT a novel, and Kucincich presumably wanted his writing to stand for itself, even when it was not so sanitized or embellished. but it is at times very nicely written.
It is an honest work. We get a real sense of a sharp intellect growing and constantly probing the world around him, adding layers of complexity to his understanding. It is a pleasure to feel his maturing development through his sense of enthusiastic discovery.
I am hoping that at some time he continues the story line, past the age of 21, as he moved into different political offices and that he gives us even more of himself.
One thing that was affected by that uncertain childhood was his ability to generate intimacy based on trust; this book gives the reader the feeling it was hiding, for protection: he was a sensitive child exposed to some genuine risk. Kucinich, wiser as a man, may have finally realized how much acknowledgment of such intimacy was missing from his life.
And I pray that people like Kucinich continue to have some power in an America intent on marginalizing anyone not supporting our present Corporatocracy.
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