By Scott Brown
The intense own trip of a guy who, opposed to all odds, rose to turn into considered one of America’s such a lot fantastic and promising new political figures Scott Brown's maximum win didn't ensue on a chilly January election evening in 2010 while he got here from in the back of to seize the U.S. Senate seat held via Ted Kennedy for almost fifty years. it all started while he survived a savage beating on the drunken, dirty-fingernail palms of a stepfather while he used to be slightly six years previous, whereas attempting to shield his mom. during this gripping memoir of resilience and redemption, Brown tells the tale of his tricky, usually nomadic adolescence, shunted from condo to residence, and city to city, seventeen occasions over his first eighteen years. He by some means thrived regardless of a principally absent father, who married 4 separate occasions. So did his mom, in relationships usually stained with alcohol, anger, or even violence. for almost 20 years' turning out to be up, Brown persevered innumerable hardships and demanding situations, even stealing nutrition to consume. He used to be periodically despatched off to dwell with kin, his possessions wrapped in a couple of outdated blankets. stored through basketball, he used to be the boy who shoveled snow from the general public courts to shoot hoops on my own within the frozen chilly. With clear-eyed conviction and unflinching can-dor, Brown tells the tale of his personal bad-boy days, of the coaches who mentored him, and of ways he discovered a fashion out of familial chaos in the course of the graceful of a ball within the internet, successful a beginning slot at the Tufts varsity basketball group as a freshman participant and turning into the tenth-highest scorer to graduate within the school's heritage. His upward push from there has been much more unbelievable: a first-year legislation pupil and member of the Massachusetts nationwide defend, he was once picked as Cosmopolitan magazine's "America's Sexiest guy" and was once vaulted into the glamorous international of recent York modeling on the top of the Eighties. however the guy who used to be ushered into the backrooms of Studio fifty four back to Massachusetts to proceed together with his army and criminal education, calm down, bring up a relatives, and shortly came upon an not likely direction that will lead him to nationwide political stardom. right here, too, are the secrets and techniques from the exceptional Senate race that captured the country's mind's eye and the way Scott Brown gained his awesome victory. Poignant, heartfelt, funny, and profound, this can be the tale of 1 man's dream and his decision to struggle for a greater destiny.
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Extra resources for Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances
Sample text
In her view, C. Bruce Brown had been stringing her along once again, just as he had two years before in Portsmouth, with his excuses and his pockets stuffed with numbers scrawled on the back of matchbook covers. This time, my mother had been his fallback in case this other woman, Delores, didn’t pan out. Or perhaps she was only one on a long list of other women. And the sting soon became greater. Delores was pregnant. My father was going to be a father again, with a new wife and new children. I can only imagine my mother’s despair and her desperation at having been abandoned twice.
My mother yelled back, and they started in. I did go to the dentist, and my grandparents ultimately paid to fix the teeth that had bitten Dan. Not too long after that, Dan Sullivan was finally and truly gone. Packed up and vanished. My mother boxed up our things, I rolled mine in a blanket, and we went back to my grandparents on Eastern Avenue. My sister was less than one year old. She has no memory of her father; she did not see him ever again. He never came to visit, never paid child support.
But when the church grew too liberal for my grandparents, they quietly stopped attending. Along with his crosswords, he had a passion for putting together puzzles, and there was invariably one spread out on the puzzle table for us to work on. Even as a teenager, I still came over to work the puzzles with him. My grandmother had been a teacher, and she saw me as her private pupil. She taught me to sew, to knit (though knitting never really took), to iron, to clean, and to cook, including tests on safety, like how to place the pan on the burner, which way the handle should point, or what to do in the event of a grease fire.