Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For
    Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For
    Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For
    Audiobook22 hours

    Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For

    Written by Susan Rice

    Narrated by Susan Rice

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    A 2020 Audie Award Finalist

    Recalling pivotal moments from her dynamic career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy, Susan E. Rice—National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama and US Ambassador to the United Nations—reveals her surprising story with unflinching candor in this New York Times bestseller.

    Mother, wife, scholar, diplomat, and fierce champion of American interests and values, Susan Rice powerfully connects the personal and the professional. Taught early, with tough love, how to compete and excel as an African American woman in settings where people of color are few, Susan now shares the wisdom she learned along the way.

    Laying bare the family struggles that shaped her early life in Washington, DC, she also examines the ancestral legacies that influenced her. Rice’s elders—immigrants on one side and descendants of slaves on the other—had high expectations that each generation would rise. And rise they did, but not without paying it forward—in uniform and in the pulpit, as educators, community leaders, and public servants.

    Susan too rose rapidly. She served throughout the Clinton administration, becoming one of the nation’s youngest assistant secretaries of state and, later, one of President Obama’s most trusted advisors.

    Rice provides an insider’s account of some of the most complex issues confronting the United States over three decades, ranging from “Black Hawk Down” in Somalia to the genocide in Rwanda and the East Africa embassy bombings in the late 1990s, and from conflicts in Libya and Syria to the Ebola epidemic, a secret channel to Iran, and the opening to Cuba during the Obama years. With unmatched insight and characteristic bluntness, she reveals previously untold stories behind recent national security challenges, including confrontations with Russia and China, the war against ISIS, the struggle to contain the fallout from Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, the U.S. response to Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the surreal transition to the Trump administration.

    Although you might think you know Susan Rice—whose name became synonymous with Benghazi following her Sunday news show appearances after the deadly 2012 terrorist attacks in Libya—now, through these pages, you truly will know her for the first time. Often mischaracterized by both political opponents and champions, Rice emerges as neither a villain nor a victim, but a strong, resilient, compassionate leader.

    Intimate, sometimes humorous, but always candid, Tough Love makes an urgent appeal to the American public to bridge our dangerous domestic divides in order to preserve our democracy and sustain our global leadership.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 8, 2019
    ISBN9781508296973
    Author

    Susan Rice

    Ambassador Susan E. Rice is currently Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the School of International Service at American University, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She serves on the boards of Netflix and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and previously served on several nonprofit boards, including the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. Rice earned her master’s degree and doctorate in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. A native of Washington, DC, and a graduate of the National Cathedral School for Girls, she is married to Ian Cameron; they have two children. Rice is an avid tennis player and a long-retired basketball player.

    Related to Tough Love

    Related audiobooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Tough Love

    4/5

    71 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Great read must read interesting to learn about the USA

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Excellent!! Learned so much about Susan Rice’s life. She was extremely transparent. Love that she narrated.
    • 5/5
      Great read with all the insights in today’s issues. Will recommend
    • 4/5
      An honest autobiographical account of an outspoken member of the Clinton and Obama administrations. This audiobook is read by the author. Mrs Rice offers insights into major events, the roles played by various parties and the outcomes that were sometimes inaccurately reported in our press.
    • 5/5
      A great insight into the inner workings of the American government and the tenacity, moral fiber and dedication it takes to be a part of it.
    • 5/5
      Awesome story about an incredible women. Easy to read with a lot of detail. After reading I feel like I have met Susan Rice. I highly recommend
    • 5/5
      It's the closest thing I'll get to working at the White House. Was a great read, culture of grit!
    • 5/5
      I listened to the audio version of this book narrated by the Author, Susan Rice. The post below served as my evaluation of this book. It obviously made a favorable impression on me.

      I know Joe Biden is scheduled to name his vice presidential candidate this week. I suspect it will be Kamala Harris. I have always backed her and I think she would be a good choice. I have almost finished reading and listening to Susan Rice's book, "Tough Love" and will state without equivocation that I believe Susan is the best choice.
    • 5/5
      Great story, really puts a human face on an incredibly tough job. It also shines a light on the unfortunate partisan divide which is tearing our country apart. It’s a story We need to hear.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this book! What a job and what an experience! I recommended this to my daughter to inspire her! I am an African but I still found it relevant to understand how the US politics affects us!
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this although I hesitated to pick it up, given the length and expected complexity. However, Susan Rice knows how to write and her family history and her ability to clearly explain what she was doing over her work history is, frankly, remarkable....and just plain fascinating. I feel as thought I KNOW her because she's talking right TO the reader about her thinking along the way as she explains what is happening. I really hated to put this book DOWN and kept wanting to get right back to it! I'm quite sure she can be a little overwhelming in person, simply because she is SO incredibly capable and it's hard to hide that---although she says she hates to admit that Obama really WAS the smartest person in the room. How she managed a marriage and two children and her incredible and progressively increasing career is covered but I'm sure she could write a second book just about that. Of course I would also love to hear lots more from her about her feelings about the Covid 19 pandemic, having lived through the Ebola crisis management. I had no idea how much I would enjoy Rice's writing about her life---now I need to go back and look for interviews with her so I can pay more attention!!
    • 4/5
      Susan Rice was an important member of Barack Obama’s government as the US Ambassador to the UN in his first term and then as the Head of the National Security Council in his second. This is her autobiography and it’s a good story.She and her brother Johnny were the children of very well educated, well paid people who believed in public service as a vocation. Her father Emmett was a PhD economist and her mother Lois a graduate of Radcliffe. Both children were raised in Washington DC. Rice attended Stanford university where she met her husband, Canadian Ian Cameron. They have two children, Jake and Maris.She was a Rhodes scholar and earned a PhD. Her job experience is impressive and she quickly rose through the ranks and developed important relationships with insiders. She meets world leader and their representatives and tells some interesting stories as an insider. She comes across as tough, innovative, smart, dedicated, principled, fair, dynamic, funny, determined and caring. This is an enjoyable book.
    • 5/5
      To the general public, Susan Rice is best known for her television appearances on September 16, 2012, in which she repeated the U.S. intelligence community's unclassified description/explanation of the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. Partisans continue to pillory her for the "horrible lies" she uttered then, even though she was repeating talking points prepared by others and had no independent knowledge of the attack or its origins. In 2012, in the midst of a presidential election, Rice was constrained from blasting her critics, but the experience was searing and the hullaballoo probably eliminated her chance of becoming secretary of state. To exorcise these demons was clearly one of Rice's objectives in writing *Tough Love*, although far from the only one. Rice's story of her family: her Jamaican immigrant and southern slave ancestors, the lessons she learned from her talented but feuding parents, her successful marriage, and the difficulties and achievements of her children: all are significant parts of *Though Love*. Rice describes herself as "not seeking permission or affirmation from others, [which] I now suspect accounts for why I inadvertently intimidate some people, especially certain men, and perhaps also why I have long inspired motivated detractors who simply can't deal with me." (p.38) Which side of this divide one stands on, intimidated or non-intimidated, detractor or admirer, may well determine one's reaction to this book. That has a lot to do with whether one is a Democrat or a Republican, an admirer of Barack Obama or a detractor. With the passage of time, however, this book will age well. It is crisply written and rapidly paced. About as clearly as is possible, Rice describes the twists and turns of the United States' relations with Africa, other regional hot spots, and the world's major powers, Admirers of Richard Holbrooke may be taken aback by Rice's dislike for this other oversized personality. This is her unvarnished opinion, subject to the judgment of future scholars. Some may be annoyed that Rice seems to describe herself as perfect, and the policies she implemented as perfect too, but that isn't quite true. She describes how an elder colleague warned her that she was "overly directive," stifled "contrary advice," and would "fail" if she did not "correct course" (pp.191, 192). On the Obama administration's Syria policy, she "acknowledge[s] the very high costs of limiting our actions and [is] neither content nor proud to admit it" (p 369). Some readers may be offended by the occasional low colloquialisms that Rice uses, like how she gave Holbrooke "the finger" and had to have thorns pulled out of her "booty," but such language reflects the temper of our times. Other books on current affairs, such as Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk, are written in a similar style.