Sales of his 2019 memoir have soared in recent days after Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the leading Democratic candidate to challenge former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
“The Truths We Carry: An American Journey” is currently ranked number one on Amazon’s women’s biographies ranking, and number two among all biographies, behind only Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s 2016 autobiography, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“This book is not intended to be a policy platform, much less a 50-point plan,” Harris wrote in the preface.
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“Rather, it’s a collection of ideas, perspectives and stories from my life and the lives of many of the people I’ve met along the way.”
Former President Donald Trump called Harris “a Republican” at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday night. [Sen.] “Bernie Sanders, Can You Believe It?” —Here are 12 insights and highlights from Harris’ life story as told in her book.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event in Las Vegas on June 28, 2024. Her 2019 book is currently popular on Amazon. (Bizayev Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
1. Her name is pronounced “Kamma-la.”
At the beginning of the book, Harris attempts to settle one of America’s great debates.
“First off, my name is pronounced ‘Kamma-la,’ like a punctuation mark,” she wrote.
“It means ‘lotus flower’ and is an important symbol in Indian culture. The lotus grows underwater, its flowers rise to the surface and its roots are firmly planted in the riverbed.”
2. On election night in 2016, she drowned her sorrows with food.
Surrounded by family and friends, all glued to the television, she recounted the scene of Nov. 8, 2016, when Republican freshman Donald Trump stunned the nation’s elites by being elected president over Democrat Hillary Clinton, a longtime political insider.
“No one knew what to say or do,” Harris wrote about Trump’s surprising victory that night.
“I sat on the bus with Doug. [Emhoff, her husband] “And then I ate an entire family-size bag of Classic Doritos. I didn’t share a single chip,” she admitted.
3. She slams Trump
In her book, Harris criticized a series of Democratic talking points following the election of the 45th president in November 2016. (Getty Images)
Just two paragraphs after sharing a video of her eating a giant bag of Doritos, Harris launched into a string of Democratic talking points following the 45th president’s victory.
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“Since then, we’ve seen this administration align with white supremacists at home, cozy up to dictators abroad, commit egregious human rights violations, including ripping babies from their mothers’ arms, and give huge tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy while ignoring the middle class… [and] It disrupts medical care and endangers women’s right to control their own bodies,” she wrote.
She also argued that Trump has fought to undermine the environment, women’s rights and media freedom.
4. Her parents were immigrants who dreamed of the American dream.
The vice president was born in Oakland, California in October 1964 to immigrant parents.
“My father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica in 1938,” Harris wrote. “He was a brilliant student who enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and then emigrated to the United States.”
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Her father is now a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University.
“My mother’s life began thousands of miles east, in South India,” Ms. Harris writes. “Shamala Gopalan was the eldest of four children. Like her father, she was a brilliant student.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters gather in front of Sproul Hall on the campus of University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, on April 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Haven Daily)
The vice president’s mother also studied at Berkeley and became an endocrinologist and breast cancer researcher. She died in 2009.
Harris’ maternal grandfather was a prominent Indian diplomat.
5. Berkeley politics shaped her thinking
The vice president noted that Harris’ parents “met and fell in love at Berkeley, where they were both involved in the civil rights movement.”
“My parents often took me to civil rights marches in a stroller… social justice was at the center of our discussions.”
She spoke of the network of left-wing activist friends she had built in Berkeley and San Francisco political circles.
Harris spoke of the network of left-leaning activist friends she has built in Berkeley and San Francisco political circles, including Latifah Simon, a Bay Area social justice activist running for Congress in 2024.
“Latifa was a genius,” Harris writes. “In 2003, she became the youngest woman ever to receive the prestigious MacArthur ‘genius’ award.”
Simon currently serves on the board of directors of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission and holds leadership positions in far-left groups such as the Rosenberg Foundation and the Akonadi Foundation.
6. Harris studied ballet and spent her teenage years in Montreal.
Her parents divorced when she was five years old, and she moved to Canada with her mother and sister Maya at age 12.
Members of Montreal’s Indian community take part in the Canada Celebration March on St. Catherine Street. (Pedro Ruiz/Gamma Raffo via Getty Images)
“My mother was given the unique opportunity in Montreal to teach at McGill University and conduct research at the Jewish General Hospital,” Harris wrote.
“It was a difficult transition for me because the only French I knew was from ballet class, and my ballet teacher, Mrs. Bovey, would yell, ‘Demi plié, up!'”
7. She was in a sorority at Howard University.
Harris missed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Wednesday and was in Indianapolis to speak at a meeting of members of the Zeta Phi Beat historically black sorority.
“There were hundreds of people there, and they all looked just like me.”
Sorority clubs and historically black education have been foundational to her life.
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“It’s heaven here!” she wrote about her freshman year at Howard University in Washington, DC.
“There were hundreds of people there, and they all looked just like me.”
Vice President Kamala Harris arrives to speak at a reproductive rights rally at Howard University on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
She wrote that she had pledged to her beloved sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, “founded by nine women at Howard University over a century ago.”
“Over the weekend I went to the National Mall to protest against apartheid in South Africa.”
8. Harris knew about George Washington Carver before he knew George Washington.
Dr. George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Missouri and was a pioneering scientist who gained fame for his work on American agriculture.
General and future president George Washington was the father of our country.
Washington crossing the Delaware River near Trenton, New Jersey, USA, Christmas Day, 1776. George Washington (1732-1799), first President of the United States. From The History of Great Britain and Scotland, 1882. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“The first George Washington that Maya and I learned about as children was George Washington Carver,” Harris writes in the book.
“We still laugh about the first time Maya heard about President George Washington from her classroom teacher and proudly thought, ‘I know him! The one with the peanuts!'”
9. Seek constitutional protection for abortion
Harris doesn’t address the pro-life versus anti-life debate much in her book, using the word “abortion” only twice and “the right to choose” only twice in her 318-page memoir.
“If you’re a woman, you know that we deserve a country where abortion is protected as a fundamental, constitutional right.”
She cited a speech she gave at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C. on January 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, to explain her position.
“If you’re a woman, you know you have the right to live in a country where equal pay and access to health care, including safe and legal abortion, are guaranteed as fundamental and constitutional rights.”
10. She has some tough views on race and tolerance in America.
The global spotlight on America’s only president and millions of people has not brightened the vice president’s bleak view of race and tolerance in the United States.
A photograph by Stan Hurd of Earthworks of Vice President Kamala Harris standing in a field in Lawrence, Kansas. (Stan Hurd/Earthworks)
“We need to tell the truth: racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism exist in this country, and we need to stand up to those forces,” Harris writes in the book’s introduction.
Near the end of The Truth We Told, she reaffirmed her commitment to America’s injustice.
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“There are many ongoing struggles in this country against racism, sexism, discrimination based on religion, nationality and sexual orientation. Each of these struggles is unique. Each deserves its own attention and effort.”
Kamala Harris’ sudden rise to the top of the Democratic presidential field has led to increased sales of her 2019 biography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.” (Sait Serkan Gurbuz/Associated Press, Bonnie Cash/Getty Images)
11. She claimed Americans are “afraid of immigrants.”
“For as long as we have been a nation of immigrants, we have also been a nation that fears immigrants,” Harris wrote about the most successful immigrant society in human history.
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“Fear of the other is deeply ingrained in American culture, and unscrupulous people in power have exploited that fear to pursue political gain,” she writes.
12. Harris shares MAGA beliefs about globalization
President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign is based on the belief that globalization is taking a serious toll on the U.S. economy.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)
Harris echoed similar sentiments in her scathing critique of America’s history of intolerance.
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“More recently, immigrants have become an easy target for blame as globalization has destroyed millions of jobs and left large swaths of the middle class unemployed,” she writes.
