Hillary Rodham Clinton
Dreams Taking Flight
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
The beautifully illustrated picture book about Hillary Clinton—now revised and updated with brand-new material about her time as Secretary of State.
Before Hillary Clinton was in the running to be president, she was a young girl growing up outside Chicago who lost the election for student-body president. She wanted to be an astronaut, to soar as high as the stars above. She kept reaching up and up as she grew. There were people who told her no—most of them simply because she was a girl—but she didn’t listen to them. There were people who didn’t think she could do it. But she believed in herself. And Hillary has been making history ever since. This is the inspiring story of a girl with dreams as big as the open sky.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This admiring picture book biography views Hillary Rodham Clinton through one specific lens: her whole life is about breaking gender barriers in pursuit of sky-high goals. Krull begins with Clinton's childhood ambition to become an astronaut ("She wrote to the national space agency to volunteer. But it was 1961, and some paths were still closed to women") and ends with her run for the presidency: "Was the land ready? No matter she was propelling her way into history." Even the detailed endnotes maintain this simplified focus: the failure of her attempt to reform health care as First Lady is attributed to "several reasons, one of which was that so many people found Hillary's ambitions and independence upsetting." Bill Clinton comes across as a rather shadowy 800-pound-gorilla (is he the hunk pictured presiding over the Yale Law Library?), while the text, which is plenty inspiring in its own right, is weakened by supplemental aphorisms on every spread ("You don't have time for fear" is the maxim accompanying the spread on her breakout Wellesley graduation speech). Bates (The Dog Who Belonged to No One) contributes radiant if consciously heart-tugging illustrations, imbuing her subject with both an endearing geekiness and determined idealism. Ages 5 10.
