Gross sales of Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2019 memoir have skyrocketed in latest days, following her ascension to the highest of the Democratic ticket to tackle former President Donald Trump within the 2024 presidential election.
“The Truths We Maintain: An American Journey” at the moment ranks at No. 1 amongst feminine biographies on Amazon. It is No. 2 amongst all biographies, behind Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s 2016 private memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“This guide is just not meant to be a coverage platform, a lot much less a 50-point plan,” Harris wrote within the preface.
JD VANCE’S HOMETOWN OF MIDDLETOWN, OHIO WAS BUILT BY STEEL INDUSTRY: WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT IT
“As a substitute, it’s a assortment of concepts and viewpoints and tales, from my life and from the lives of the many individuals I’ve met alongside the best way.”
As former President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, known as Harris “extra liberal than [Sen.] Bernie Sanders, are you able to imagine it” — listed here are 12 insights and highlights from Harris’ life story as she shared in her personal guide.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a marketing campaign occasion on June 28, 2024, in Las Vegas. Her guide from 2019 is now a scorching ticket on Amazon. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Evaluation-Journal/Tribune Information Service by way of Getty Photos)
1. Her title is pronounced ‘comma-la’
Early within the guide, Harris tried to settle the nice American debate.
“First, my title is pronounced ‘comma-la,’ just like the punctuation mark,” she wrote.
“It means ‘lotus flower,’ which is a logo of significance in Indian tradition. A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising to the floor whereas its roots are planted firmly within the river backside.”
2. She ate her sorrows away on Election Evening 2016
With household and associates round her and all of them glued to the tv, she recounted the scene on Nov. 8, 2016, when Republican political newcomer Donald Trump stunned American elites throughout the nation along with his election to president over longtime political insider Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“Nobody actually knew what to say or do,” wrote Harris about Trump’s beautiful victory that evening.
“I sat down on the coach with Doug [Emhoff, her husband] and ate a whole family-size bag of basic Doritos. Didn’t share a single chip,” she admitted.
3. She savages Trump
In her guide, Harris fired off a barrage of Democratic speaking factors concerning the forty fifth president after he was elected in Nov. 2016. (Getty Photos)
Simply two paragraphs after sharing how she devoured a large bag of Doritos, Harris fired off a verbal barrage of Democratic speaking factors concerning the forty fifth president after his triumphant election.
MILITARY VETERAN’S BOOK, ‘THE WAR ON WARRIORS,’ MAINTAINS WEEKS-LONG PROMINENCE ON NY TIMES BESTSELLER LIST
“Within the years since, we’ve seen an administration align itself with white supremacists at residence and comfy as much as dictators overseas; rip infants from their moms’ arms in grotesque violation of their human rights; give companies and the rich enormous tax cuts whereas ignoring the center class … [and] sabotage well being care and imperil a girl’s proper to manage her personal physique,” she wrote partly.
Trump, she additionally insisted, has fought to hurt the atmosphere, ladies’s rights and free media.
4. Her mother and father had been immigrants with an American dream
The vp was born in Oakland, California, in October 1964, to immigrant mother and father.
“My father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica in 1938,” Harris wrote. “He was a superb pupil who immigrated to the US after being admitted to the College of California at Berkeley.”
AMERICAN CULTURE QUIZ: TEST YOURSELF ON PRESIDENTS, COUNTRY QUEENS AND THE BIG KAHUNA
Her dad is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford College right this moment.
“My mom’s life started 1000’s of miles to the east, in southern India,” wrote Harris. “Shyamala Gopalan was the oldest of 4 youngsters … Like my father, she was a gifted pupil.”
Professional-Palestinian protesters collect in entrance of Sproul Corridor on the campus of the College of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California, on April 23, 2024. (AP Picture/Haven Daley)
The vp’s mom additionally studied at Berkeley, and have become a health care provider of endocrinology and breast most cancers researcher. She died in 2009.
Harris’ maternal grandfather was a distinguished Indian diplomat.
5. Berkeley politics formed her outlook
Harris’ mother and father “met and fell in love in Berkeley whereas collaborating within the civil rights motion,” the vp famous.
“My mother and father usually introduced me in a stroller with them to civil rights marches … Social justice was a central a part of our discussions.”
She mentioned the community of leftist activist associates she developed in Berkeley and San Francisco political circles.
Harris mentioned the community of leftist activist associates she developed in Berkeley and San Francisco political circles. Amongst them: Lateefah Simon, a Bay Space social justice warrior and 2024 congressional candidate.
“Lateefah was a genius,” Harris wrote. “In 2003, she turned the youngest girl to ever win the celebrated MacArthur ‘Genius’ award.”
Simon right this moment sits on the Bay Space Speedy Transport board of administrators and has loved management positions with far-left teams such because the Rosenberg Basis and the Akonadi Basis.
6. Harris took ballet, spent her teen years in Montreal
Her mother and father divorced when she was 5 years previous, and when she was 12 she moved together with her mom and sister Maya to Canada.
Members of Montreal’s Indian neighborhood are proven marching in Canada Celebration on St Catherine’s Avenue. (Pedro RUIZ/Gamma-Rapho by way of Getty Photos)
“My mom was supplied a singular alternative in Montreal, instructing at McGill College and conducting analysis on the Jewish Normal Hospital,” Harris wrote.
“It was a troublesome transition for me, because the solely French I knew was from ballet lessons, the place Madame Bovie, my ballet instructor, would shout, ‘Demi-plie, and up!’”
7. She was a sorority sister at Howard College
Harris skipped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s look on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to talk earlier than a gathering of traditionally black sorority members of Zeta Phi Beat in Indianapolis.
“There have been lots of of individuals and everybody seemed like me.”
Sororities and traditionally Black training are foundations of her life.
5 MUST-READ BOOKS WITH LIFE LESSONS TO GET YOUR CHILD COLLEGE-READY THIS SUMMER
“‘That is heaven!'” she wrote about arriving at Howard College in Washington, D.C., for her freshman 12 months.
“There have been lots of of individuals and everybody seemed like me.”
Vice President Kamala Harris arrives to talk at a Rally for Reproductive Rights at Howard College on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Instances by way of Getty Photos)
She pledged to a sorority, “my beloved Alpha Kappa Alpha, based by 9 ladies at Howard greater than a century in the past,” she wrote.
“On weekends, we went all the way down to the Nationwide Mall to protest apartheid in South Africa.”
8. Harris realized about George Washington Carver earlier than she realized of George Washington
Dr. George Washington Carver was the pioneering scientist born into slavery in Missouri who rose to fame for his analysis in American agriculture.
Normal and later President George Washington was the daddy of our nation.
Washington crossing the Delaware, close to Trenton, New Jersey, America, Christmas 1776. George Washington (1732-1799), first president of the US. From English and Scottish Historical past, printed 1882. (Common Historical past Archive/Common Photos Group by way of Getty Photos)
“The primary George Washington Maya and I realized about after we had been younger was George Washington Carver,” Harris wrote within the guide.
“We nonetheless snicker concerning the first time Maya heard a classroom instructor discuss President George Washington and he or she thought to herself proudly, ‘I do know him! He’s the one who labored with peanuts!’”
9. She desires constitutional safety for abortion
Harris treaded calmly on the pro-choice/pro-life debate in her guide. She talked about the phrase “abortion” solely twice and the phrase “proper to decide on” twice, in her 318-page memoir.
“In case you are a girl, interval, you recognize we deserve a rustic with … abortion, protected as a elementary and constitutional proper.”
She acknowledged her place quoting a speech she gave on the Girls’s March in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration.
“In case you are a girl, interval, you recognize we deserve a rustic with equal pay and entry to well being care, together with a protected and authorized abortion, protected as a elementary and constitutional proper.”
10. She holds a stark view of race and tolerance within the USA
The one-in-America rise to world prominence of thousands and thousands of individuals has not brightened the vp’s stark view of race and tolerance in the US.
A picture of Vice President Kamala Harris is proven in a subject in Lawrence, Kansas, created by Stan Herd of Earthworks. (Stan Herd/Earthworks)
“We have to converse reality: that racism, sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism are actual on this nation, and we have to confront these forces,” Harris wrote early within the guide.
She reconfirmed her dedication to American injustice close to the top of “The Truths We Instructed.”
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
“There are such a lot of ongoing struggles on this nation – in opposition to racism and sexism, in opposition to discrimination based mostly on faith, nationwide origin and sexual orientation. Every of those struggles is exclusive. Every deserves its personal consideration and energy.”
Kamala Harris’ sudden rise to the highest of the Democrat ticket for president has spurred an increase in gross sales of her 2019 biography, “The Truths We Maintain: An American Journey.” (Sait Serkan Gurbuz/AP; Bonnie Money/Getty Photos)
11. She claimed Individuals ‘worry immigrants’
“For so long as ours has been a nation of immigrants, we’ve got been a nation that fears immigrants,” Harris wrote of probably the most profitable immigrant society in human historical past.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER
“Concern of the opposite is woven into the material of American tradition — and unscrupulous individuals in energy have exploited that worry in pursuit of political benefit,” she additionally wrote.
12. Harris shares a MAGA perception about globalization
Trump’s Make America Nice Once more motion is constructed on the assumption that globalization has come at a extreme price to the U.S. economic system.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Photos)
Harris shared the identical sentiment whereas skewering America for its historical past of intolerance.
For extra Life-style articles, go to foxnews.com/way of life
“Extra just lately, as globalization has robbed the nation of thousands and thousands of jobs and displaces enormous swaths of the center class, immigrants have turn out to be handy targets for blame,” she additionally wrote.
