Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For

Rice, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Obama administration, delivers a stellar debut memoir of her public service career. Born in 1964 in Washington, D.C., Rice credits her mother, a scholar, and father, an economics expert, with inspiring her to work hard. She graduated from Stanford University in 1986, then attended Oxford University’s New College, where she studied international relations and was “the only black person.” She then worked on national security and peacekeeping during the Clinton administration beginning in 1993, and dealt with the failed military mission made famous in Black Hawk Down (“The Somalia crisis also taught me to be skeptical of Congress’s capacity” to address national security crises, she notes). Rice broke with the Clintons in 2007 to back Obama for president and enthrallingly covers her time in Obama’s administration: she recalls her appearance on various news programs during the 2012 Benghazi controversy, after which she was branded a liar by Republicans in “a selective and misleading parsing of my Sunday show statements,” as well as successfully working with Iran in 2013 to halt its nuclear weapons program. Along the way, Rice writes of juggling work and motherhood, and of the importance of being one’s own advocate. Rice’s insightful memoir serves as an astute, analytical take on recent American political history. (Oct.)