Dreams of Being an Astronaut

This is an excellent, thorough, and complete biography of the woman who might well become our next President, Hillary Rodham Clinton. It is written at a young adult level which means we get the key points of Hillary's life in good, clear writing without unnecessary digressions.

For anyone interested in the 2016 elections and the future of the United States of America this is required reading.

Here is a brief preview of some of the things you will learn by reading this excellent book:

***

Hillary's father, Hugh, was kind of a tough dad.

If one of his children left the cap off the toothpaste he would throw it out the window and make the child go find it. He didn't praise his children very often. When Hillary brought home A's on her report card he would just say, "That must be an easy school you go to."

Her mom, Dorothy, was more gentle and supportive. Even though "Hillary" was a boy's name in the late 1940's, Dorothy gave it to her daughter because she thought it sounded unusual and exotic.

Dorothy's parents divorced when she was eight and she lived with strict grandparents who once grounded her for months for trick-or-treating at Halloween. She never had a chance to go to college and longed for better opportunities for her own children.

Dorothy took Hillary to the library every week. In later life she made a very revealing remark that probably tells us a lot about her own experiences: "I was determined that no daughter of mine was going to have to go through the agony of being afraid to say what she had on her mind."

In sixth grade Hillary wrote an essay on her future. "When I grow up I want to have had the best education I could have possibly obtained. If I obtain this I will probably be able to get a very good job." As to specific careers she wrote, "I want to either be a teacher or a nuclear physics scientist."

If you want to support "Anything Smart" just click on book links like the one below to buy your books. "Anything Smart" will receive a commission. Thanks!

As the American space program began to speed up in the early 1960's Hillary became very excited about becoming an astronaut. She wrote a letter to NASA requesting information only to be told that women would not be accepted into the program.

This might have been the first time in her young life that Hillary noticed women were discriminated against. It would not be the last time, and equal rights for women would become one of her main issues, something she has worked on for decades.

It's easy to forget injustices that existed in the past but imagine how shocking it must have been for a smart, ambitious young American to learn that some careers would be denied to her... just because she was a girl!

In the early 1960's there was still brutal racism in the United States: "In the South, blacks were forbidden from eating in many restaurants, shopping in some stores, staying in hotels, and even using the same water fountains as whites. In the summer of 1961, groups of blacks and whites calling themselves Freedom Riders had traveled though the South, trying to end segregation in bus terminals along the way. They were attacked and brutally beaten by angry white mobs and jailed for trespassing."

Many people don't like to remember or talk about these times now but Hillary lived through them in her formative years. She attended a talk by Martin Luther King in April 1962 and the 14-year-old Hillary got to meet the great civil rights leader backstage.

***

Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

***

Please send me your own thoughts on this book and maybe your review will be published here at AnythingSmart.org.