Every Day Is Extra

Front Cover
Simon and Schuster, Nov 12, 2019 - Biography & Autobiography - 640 pages
An instant New York Times bestseller, John Kerry’s revealing memoir offers “a detailed record of an important life…frank, thoughtful, and clearly written…A bittersweet reminder of what the country once demanded of its leaders” (The New York Times Book Review).

Every Day Is Extra is John Kerry’s candid personal story. A Yale graduate, Kerry enlisted in the US Navy in 1966, and served in Vietnam. He returned home highly decorated but disillusioned, and he testified powerfully before Congress as a young veteran opposed to the war. Kerry was elected to the Senate in 1984, eventually serving five terms. In 2004 he was the Democratic presidential nominee and came within one state—Ohio—of winning. He succeeded Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in 2013. In that position he tried to find peace in the Middle East; dealt with the Syrian civil war while combatting ISIS; and negotiated the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement.

“In these pages Kerry shows remarkable honesty, depth, even spirituality…There is remarkable poignancy—not the usual currency of the career politician and the country’s top diplomat” (The Boston Globe). A witness to some of the most important events of our recent history, Kerry tells wonderful stories about colleagues Ted Kennedy and John McCain, as well as President Obama and other major figures. He writes movingly of recovering his faith while in the Senate, and how he deplores the hyper-partisanship that has infected Washington.

Every Day Is Extra “draws back the curtain on a life you thought you knew, but turns out to be a bit different…A surprisingly personal book” (The Washington Post) that shows Kerry for the dedicated, witty, and authentic man that he is and provides forceful testimony for the importance of diplomacy and American leadership to address the increasingly complex challenges of a more globalized world.
 

Contents

Childhood
1
Bright College Years
26
Raising My Right Hand
42
War
67
The War at Home
110
Finding My Way
132
The Old Senate
149
Holding Washington Accountable
182
Dusting Myself
330
New President Broken Senate
345
Mr Chairman
368
Diplomacy in a Dangerous World
408
Getting Caught Trying
440
Preventing a War
485
The Open Wound
524
Protecting the Planet
556

Making Peace
190
A Time of Transition
202
Cancer and Comebacks
250
Within a Whisper 281 330
281
Afterword
581
Acknowledgments
585
623
591
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2019)

John Forbes Kerry is a former Secretary of State and five-term US Senator. Kerry is the author of Every Day Is Extra, A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America, The New War, and the best-selling This Moment on Earth. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow for Global Affairs at Yale University as well as the inaugural Visiting Distinguished Statesman for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, have two daughters, three sons, and seven grandchildren.

Bibliographic information