Book Review: "Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life"

Book Review: "Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life"
by SusanG
Sun Dec 13, 2009 at 08:40:03 AM PST

Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life
By Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith
Public Affairs: New York
Hardback, 360 pages, $26.95
November 2009


You'll have no idea how much you missed her until you get the chance to read snippets of her again.

How sorely we miss and need Molly Ivins these days hits you like a four-by-four when you crack the pages of Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life. This new biography is written by a former researcher who worked for Ivins in the 1990s (W. Michael Smith) and a Texas journalist (Bill Minutaglio) who had access to all papers she packed away over the years, from shopping lists to personal letters.

And a packrat she was, to our benefit.

What emerges from this thoughtful biography is a very complicated woman, part self-constructed "personality," part tortured soul, pure brilliant iconoclast. What becomes most apparent is how flat-out unlikely it was that we ever heard from her at all. Raised as she was in a socially conservative, upper middle class family in Houston, Ivins attended all the finest private schools, went on an exchange to France (she was fluent in French) and eventually graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts -- not the biography you'd expect from someone with the perfect eye for viewing hypocrisy and the fiery down-home language to name it. Remember, we're talking about the woman who once quipped about a Texas Congressman, "If his IQ slips any lower we'll have to water him twice a day."

Ah, Molly. There will never be another like her.

more...

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/13/813655/-Book-Review:-Molly-Ivins:-A-Rebel-Life

but I haven't been able to make myself read it yet. I know I will laugh, but I also know it will be painful in a way.
I almost feel like I will be saying hello and then goodby again. Too many goodbyes these days.....

I miss Molly Ivins.

love molly, and i think the country has been worse off without her.