(2/2011) Scott Brown: "My Life Is Like A Spiderweb"

Book and Event Review By James R. Holland

“My Life Is Like A Spiderweb…”

New Republican Senator Scott Brown is in the middle of several book signing events in Boston and other Massachesetts locations. Today he spent several hours at the Barnes & Noble Starbucks Coffee Shop autographing books for some of the local voters or would-be-voters.

After the signing event, he remained at the Back Bay location for a series of media interviews about his book and the events he described in the story of his life that he titled Against All Odds.

Without exception, the book buyers found the new U.S. Senator charming, approachable and gracious. He gladly posed for pictures if the book buyer had brought a camera to capture the event. There was some disagreement among the audience about whether he looked younger or older than they expected. All agreed the man is indeed very handsome and fit looking.

A reader has to admire someone who describes his life as being like a spiderweb. He obviously isn’t suffering from any kind of Messianic complex. The secret of the young Senator from Massachusetts’s success is that he can relate to everyone and he isn’t afraid to say “thank you” and share credit for his accomplishments. He reminds many voters of Ronald Reagan in that regard. The 40^th President didn’t care who got the credit just as long as the work got done.

As far as the spiderweb comparison goes, Brown means each piece of web is an integral part of the overall construction. “The final creation is an intricate combination of perfectly positioned” links that form the whole. “Sever just one key link and the entire web succumbs to capricious winds. With one cut, the entire web is razed.”

“My life is like that web. I cannot imagine any piece of its design to be any different; I would not change any part of the experiences that have been woven together to create the larger whole…. If I changed any one of these things, it would change the architecture of my life, and I would no longer be the person I am today.”

In the first of 18 chapters in this 325-page memoir the author tells how at age 13 he was busted by store security for stealing popular music albums from a Liberty Tree Mall record store. He had already stolen food from super markets and a suit need to attend a school dance from a clothing store in the years prior to his arrest for record theft. Young Scott Brown seemed headed for an entirely different kind of public record.

Anyone who has heard any news coverage of this new book has probably only learned that as a kid Scott Brown was the victim of repeated sexual molestations and brutal beatings. However, while that naturally attracts the attention of the “headline hunting” media, that’s only a small part of the book. This is a book of salvation and redemption. It’s the story of how one young man’s slide toward a life of crime was deflected back toward the main stream of society.

Brown attended Tufts University and played basketball there, which provided him with some free clothes. “I got shorts, T-shirts, and sweats. And that was what I wore, to class, to parties…I would do almost anything for extra cash.” He recalls earning $10 for a two-minute job of cleaning up some drunk’s vomit. “No job was too disgusting or too small.”

At the end of 1979, in the middle of his junior year, he went to the armory at “Camp Curtis Guild to officially register to join the Army National Guard.” It was the beginning of his long service in the Army National Guard.

Scott pauses from his book signing long enough to answer a question from one of his staff members. Photo Credit: James R. Holland (Feb 2011)Basketball is the love that allowed him to avoid becoming a juvenile delinquent. He recalls as a child he used to take his basketball to bed with him. He was famous in Massachusetts for being picked as ‘Cosmopolitan’ magazine’s ‘America’s Sexiest Man’ and was vaulted into the glamorous world of New York modeling at the height of the 1980s. When he returned to Tufts he also signed up for the ROTC program. He was in both the Guard and the ROTC at the same time.

Despite the temptations of being a celebrity model at the time he avoided the downward spiral that often comes with the world of private clubbing and continued his education and military service. He also continued his modeling because it provided him the money he needed to attend Boston College Law School.

Like another Massachusetts’s politician with a new memoir, Governor Deval Patrick, Senator Brown’s life story is amazing. So was Patrick’s. This is a well written, easy to read tale of personal trial and professional triumph. As Brown states in his lengthy acknowledgements and thank you’s at the conclusion of his book, “As soon as I won the election in January 2010, publishers began calling, interested in a book. I had never considered such a project, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to tell my story, the good and the bad. My hope in sharing my life is that it will give hope to others, that other people who are struggling will be reminded that things can get better.”

Like his service as a Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this book serves a good purpose and it’s nice Scott Brown took the time to see it completed.

James R. Holland is a film editor, producer, and author–most recently of Adventure Photographer (A Bit of Boston Books/ 2009).  He reviews movies exclusively for Basil & Spice.  Visit James R. Holland’s Writer’s Page.

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