My Life [antikvár]

After the pubhcation of My Life in June 2004, I traveled across America and to many other countries to promote it. I was astonished and grateful when so many people waited long hours, sometimes overnight, to get their books signed, as more than 60,000 people now have. In book signings, interviews, and chance encounters, people made very specific and widely diverse observations about what they took away from reading my story, further evidence that we all absorb information through the prism of our ovm experiences, interests, and needs. Most people's comments fell into three categories: how the account of my early years struck a chord with them; how they had been affected by something I did as President; and how the book had increased their understanding of modern politics and policy issues. Of course, a fair number of people kidded me about the book's length and weight. Many were kind enough just to say they enjoyed it, including, most recently, a young member of the Florida A&M University band as former President Bush and I were walking onto the field for the pre-game show at the Super Bowl to salute our military forces. For the first several weeks after tlie book came out, most people talked to me about my childhood and how reading about it caused them to reflect back on their own early years. A woman Hillary and I met in a Colorado bookstore and a European television interviewer both spoke openly about their own troubled childhoods and said reading my story had helped them to better understand their own, including problems they wrestled with well into adulthood. Many young readers, often immigrants or foreign exchange students, said they read my story to get guidance about how they, too, could live their dreams. Many people at the book signings spoke briefly or handed me letters of thanks for the Family and Medical Leave Law, the extra help to go to college, the chance to move firom welfare to work, the opportunity to serve in AmeriCorps, or the benefits they received from our economic policies. People from Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Mexico, Colombia, Vietnam, Korea, the Middle East, and Africa thanked me for trying to help their homelands and for teUing the story of the struggles going on there. A Secret Service agent who had served in the U.S. Army Special Forces in