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Product Description
A bracingly honest memoir by the wife of former Reagan press secretary James Brady on the bullet that changed their lives-and how personal tragedy inspired great public accomplishment. On March 30, 1981, Sarah Brady's husband James was critically injured during an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. Some years later, she presided over passage of a handgun control law known as the Brady Bill. Now, in A Good Fight, Brady tells the compelling human story behind these news events in a voice laced with honesty, humor, and a complete absence of self-pity. It is the story of her involvement in Republican politics; of her courtship and marriage; of the Brady's brief idyll as "country mice" among the Reagan glitterati, and of the tragic day that changed their lives forever. Sarah talks candidly about the many obstacles and difficulties her family encountered learning to live together after the shooting, and about her challenges as a mother. She describes how she became a gun control activist-which didn't happen until years after her husband's shooting. She recalls her decade of work with Handgun Control Inc. which culminated in the passage of the Brady Bill and led to her organization's merger with the Million Mom March. The book also tells the story of Sarah's recent battle with lung cancer, and demonstrates how she's fighting back against this latest adversity with the same spirit she brought to all her other challenges.Much more than a polemic about the importance of gun control, A Good Fight is a wonderfully readable personal story about an ordinary woman coping with extraordinary events and becoming extraordinary in the process.
Amazon.com Review
"After a disaster," writes Sarah Brady, "you shouldn't try to go back and live exactly the way you did before." Brady has weathered the crippling of her husband by attempted Reagan assassin John Hinckley, the gun-control battle against the National Rifle Association, scorn heaped on her by pro-gun conservative pundits, raising a son with learning disabilities, and recurrent cancer. These hardships have taught her abundant lessons in how to conduct a political campaign and reckon with shortcomings and doubts, lessons she imparts throughout this highly readable memoir.
Those hardships have only steeled Brady's resolve both to win her battles and enjoy her time in the sun--a good fight indeed. --Gregory McNamee
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