Senator Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance (released in April 2014) is a New York Times Bestseller, a rarity for a political book -- let alone for a political book of a then-inspiring Senator from Massachusetts. Primarily, the book is memoir. It tells the story of Warren's life in Oklahoma through her campaign to be one of the two United States senators from Massachusetts. When she was a child, Warren dreamed of going to college to become an Elementary School teacher. Already, this set Warren apart from her families and her peers -- most of the people she knew (including her family) -- were from modest means, so going to college would be difficult. Warren married early and ultimately did not choose to go to college to become an Elementary School teacher. Instead, she became a lawyer and law professor who had a profound interest in bankruptcy and why people went bankrupt. That's why when she got a call to come to Washington D.C. to help Congress rewrite the bankruptcy laws, she went.
In Washington, she discovered how broken the bankruptcy laws -- and ultimately the Federal Government itself -- was. She inspired change in the banking industry (she was responsible for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), but she realized that she could not do any good unless she ran for public office. She ran for -- and ultimately won -- the most competitive Senate race in the country. That's why A Fighting Chance is a story of perseverance but it secondarily is a campaign book. It details how Warren feels she could help Massachusetts (these are the key components of her campaign).
The books warm critical and sales reception reflected some of the themes in Warren's book. Amy Chozick of The New York Times loved the book, writing, "The book is a potent mix of memoir and policy that makes politics seem like a necessary evil, and yet it's impossible to read Warren's story without thinking about her meteoric rise in the Democratic Party and those Warren groupies on Connecticut Avenue. That makes the aw-shucks, I-just-stumbled-into-the-Senate anecdotes that propel her narrative feel inevitably like the savvy (critics would say self-serving) story lines that would play so well at an Elks Club in Iowa." Many other reviewers felt the same way about the book. Evidently, so did the general public. More than 60,000 books were sold in the third quarter of 2014, prompting the publisher to issue a paperback version of the book.
