Cooking With Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics.

Cooking With Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics by Donna Brazile Simon & Schuster, June 2004 $23.00, ISBN 0-743-25398-1

Autobiographies give us insight into what drives extraordinary people and help us understand history. For black folks struggling to make it in a white world, Donna Brazile's tale of rising from poverty in rural Louisiana to becoming the first African American to run a major presidential campaign is well worth the investment of time--and it won't take much, since you will probably race through it.

That the campaign was in 2000 only stokes interest. Brazile paints a chilling big picture of that controversy-soaked race: Al Gore gambled on a sister with a history of rabble rousing and inability to hold her tongue because she had a solid track record for organization and for getting out the vote. It was a bold move that almost worked--and did, many feel, except for what Brazile argues was a concerted disenfranchisement ha Florida that Democrats should have made a bigger stink about.

Brazile has been thick in the tangled affairs of national politics, and her story gives fascinating insight into how one enters and navigates that world: She is a woman with a talent for organizing (she formed neighborhood enterprises as a child), an obsession with record keeping (she started keeping a diary at 5), a photographic memory (she says, and the book's detail lends that claim credibility), and a perceived score to settle with those on the wrong side of history.

The author is surprisingly candid in most respects, but in the end, one gets the feeling Brazile has carefully arranged her inner sanctuary before letting us look inside. A key unanswered question is why she never tan for office herself. She tells us virtually nothing about her romantic life--lid that have anything to do with it? It did not ruin the book, but I would have liked to know.

--Reviewed by Dan Holly Dan Holly, a newspaper editor in North Carolina, is a former Capitol Hill press secretary and author of Sometimes You Get the Bear (August Press, 1999).