Sales of Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2019 memoir have skyrocketed in recent days, following her ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket to take on former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
“The Truths We Hold: An American Journey” currently ranks at No. 1 among female biographies on Amazon. It’s No. 2 among all biographies, behind Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s 2016 personal memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“This book is not meant to be a policy platform, much less a 50-point plan,” Harris wrote in the preface.
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“Instead, it is a collection of ideas and viewpoints and stories, from my life and from the lives of the many people I’ve met along the way.”
As former President Donald Trump on Wednesday night at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, called Harris “more liberal than [Sen.] Bernie Sanders, can you believe it” — here are 12 insights and highlights from Harris’ life story as she shared in her own book.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event on June 28, 2024, in Las Vegas. Her book from 2019 is now a hot ticket on Amazon. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
1. Her name is pronounced ‘comma-la’
Early in the book, Harris tried to settle the great American debate.
“First, my name is pronounced ‘comma-la,’ like the punctuation mark,” she wrote.
“It means ‘lotus flower,’ which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture. A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising to the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom.”
2. She ate her sorrows away on Election Night 2016
With family and friends around her and all of them glued to the television, she recounted the scene on Nov. 8, 2016, when Republican political newcomer Donald Trump surprised American elites across the nation with his election to president over longtime political insider Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“No one really knew what to say or do,” wrote Harris about Trump’s stunning victory that night.
“I sat down on the coach with Doug [Emhoff, her husband] and ate an entire family-size bag of classic Doritos. Didn’t share a single chip,” she admitted.
3. She savages Trump
In her book, Harris fired off a barrage of Democratic talking points about the 45th president after he was elected in Nov. 2016. (Getty Images)
Just two paragraphs after sharing how she devoured a giant bag of Doritos, Harris fired off a verbal barrage of Democratic talking points about the 45th president after his triumphant election.
“In the years since, we’ve seen an administration align itself with white supremacists at home and cozy up to dictators abroad; rip babies from their mothers’ arms in grotesque violation of their human rights; give corporations and the wealthy huge tax cuts while ignoring the middle class … [and] sabotage health care and imperil a woman’s right to control her own body,” she wrote in part.
Trump, she also insisted, has fought to harm the environment, women’s rights and free media.
4. Her parents were immigrants with an American dream
The vice president was born in Oakland, California, in October 1964, to immigrant parents.
“My father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica in 1938,” Harris wrote. “He was a brilliant student who immigrated to the United States after being admitted to the University of California at Berkeley.”
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Her dad is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University today.
“My mother’s life began thousands of miles to the east, in southern India,” wrote Harris. “Shyamala Gopalan was the oldest of four children … Like my father, she was a gifted student.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters gather in front of Sproul Hall on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California, on April 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Haven Daley)
The vice president’s mother also studied at Berkeley, and became a doctor of endocrinology and breast cancer researcher. She died in 2009.
Harris’ maternal grandfather was a prominent Indian diplomat.
5. Berkeley politics shaped her outlook
Harris’ parents “met and fell in love in Berkeley while participating in the civil rights movement,” the vice president noted.
“My parents often brought me in a stroller with them to civil rights marches … Social justice was a central part of our discussions.”
She discussed the network of leftist activist friends she developed in Berkeley and San Francisco political circles.
Harris discussed the network of leftist activist friends she developed in Berkeley and San Francisco political circles. Among them: Lateefah Simon, a Bay Area social justice warrior and 2024 congressional candidate.
“Lateefah was a genius,” Harris wrote. “In 2003, she became the youngest woman to ever win the prestigious MacArthur ‘Genius’ award.”
Simon today sits on the Bay Area Rapid Transport board of directors and has enjoyed leadership positions with far-left groups such as the Rosenberg Foundation and the Akonadi Foundation.
6. Harris took ballet, spent her teen years in Montreal
Her parents divorced when she was five years old, and when she was 12 she moved with her mother and sister Maya to Canada.
Members of Montreal’s Indian community are shown marching in Canada Celebration on St Catherine’s Street. (Pedro RUIZ/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
“My mother was offered a unique opportunity in Montreal, teaching at McGill University and conducting research at the Jewish General Hospital,” Harris wrote.
“It was a difficult transition for me, since the only French I knew was from ballet classes, where Madame Bovie, my ballet teacher, would shout, ‘Demi-plie, and up!’”
7. She was a sorority sister at Howard University
Harris skipped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to speak before a meeting of historically black sorority members of Zeta Phi Beat in Indianapolis.
“There were hundreds of people and everyone looked like me.”
Sororities and historically Black education are foundations of her life.
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“‘This is heaven!'” she wrote about arriving at Howard University in Washington, D.C., for her freshman year.
“There were hundreds of people and everyone looked like me.”
Vice President Kamala Harris arrives to speak at a Rally for Reproductive Rights at Howard University on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
She pledged to a sorority, “my beloved Alpha Kappa Alpha, founded by nine women at Howard more than a century ago,” she wrote.
“On weekends, we went down to the National Mall to protest apartheid in South Africa.”
8. Harris learned about George Washington Carver before she learned of George Washington
Dr. George Washington Carver was the pioneering scientist born into slavery in Missouri who rose to fame for his research in American agriculture.
General and later President George Washington was the father of our country.
Washington crossing the Delaware, near Trenton, New Jersey, America, Christmas 1776. George Washington (1732-1799), first president of the United States. From English and Scottish History, published 1882. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“The first George Washington Maya and I learned about when we were young was George Washington Carver,” Harris wrote in the book.
“We still laugh about the first time Maya heard a classroom teacher talk about President George Washington and she thought to herself proudly, ‘I know him! He’s the one who worked with peanuts!’”
9. She wants constitutional protection for abortion
Harris treaded lightly on the pro-choice/pro-life debate in her book. She mentioned the word “abortion” only twice and the phrase “right to choose” twice, in her 318-page memoir.
“If you are a woman, period, you know we deserve a country with … abortion, protected as a fundamental and constitutional right.”
She stated her position quoting a speech she gave at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration.
“If you are a woman, period, you know we deserve a country with equal pay and access to health care, including a safe and legal abortion, protected as a fundamental and constitutional right.”
10. She holds a stark view of race and tolerance in the USA
The only-in-America rise to global prominence of millions of people has not brightened the vice president’s stark view of race and tolerance in the United States.
An image of Vice President Kamala Harris is shown in a field in Lawrence, Kansas, created by Stan Herd of Earthworks. (Stan Herd/Earthworks)
“We need to speak truth: that racism, sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism are real in this country, and we need to confront those forces,” Harris wrote early in the book.
She reconfirmed her commitment to American injustice near the end of “The Truths We Told.”
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“There are so many ongoing struggles in this country – against racism and sexism, against discrimination based on religion, national origin and sexual orientation. Each of these struggles is unique. Each deserves its own attention and effort.”
Kamala Harris’ sudden rise to the top of the Democrat ticket for president has spurred a rise in sales of her 2019 biography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.” (Sait Serkan Gurbuz/AP; Bonnie Cash/Getty Images)
11. She claimed Americans ‘fear immigrants’
“For as long as ours has been a nation of immigrants, we have been a nation that fears immigrants,” Harris wrote of the most successful immigrant society in human history.
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“Fear of the other is woven into the fabric of American culture — and unscrupulous people in power have exploited that fear in pursuit of political advantage,” she also wrote.
12. Harris shares a MAGA belief about globalization
Trump’s Make America Great Again movement is built on the belief that globalization has come at a severe cost to the U.S. economy.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)
Harris shared the same sentiment while skewering America for its history of intolerance.
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“More recently, as globalization has robbed the country of millions of jobs and displaces huge swaths of the middle class, immigrants have become convenient targets for blame,” she also wrote.
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