BOSTON — Those hoping for a daggers-out political tell-all from Gov. Deval Patrick’s new memoir will be sorely disappointed.
Instead, in his book A Reason to Believe, the Massachusetts Democrat tells his version of the American rags to riches story, chronicling what he dubs his “improbable” rise from a broken home and poverty on Chicago’s South Side to the upper echelons of American politics.
Along the way, Patrick says he hopes to impart some of the lessons he’s learned, including those from the grandparents who helped raise him, the teachers who took him under their wings, the strangers who treated him like a cherished guest and even the Chicago bus driver who forgave his lack of a fare.
“I’m a very hopeful person. I’m an unrepentant idealist,” Patrick says. “I’m just passing on some of those lessons that have been transcendent to me.”
Many of those lessons focus on how Patrick learned to navigate between what seemed like polar opposite worlds — the crowded, urban and largely Black neighborhood of his youth and the privileged, largely White world he entered when he won a scholarship to the prestigious prep school Milton Academy near Boston when he was 14 years old.
At first, Patrick says he felt like he was living on two different planets, but learned to navigate through both, eventually graduating from Harvard University and Harvard Law School.
While acknowledging the boost he got from attending Milton Academy, Patrick dismisses the idea that without that opportunity, his life would have spiraled downhill.
