Publishers Weekly
★ 05/01/2023
Former Harvard president Faust (This Republic of Suffering) nimbly blends the personal and the political in this affecting memoir that covers her life from 1947 (the year she was born) through 1968. Faust, who was raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, had difficult relationships with both of her parents: her WWII veteran father was perpetually disengaged, and her upper-class mother was often angry. Disenchanted with their conservative worldviews, Faust forged her own, shaped by the literature of the era, including To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank. Her outrage at racist discrimination led a nine-year-old Faust to write to then President Eisenhower to share her feelings that a segregated society was an unjust one (the memoir opens with a photocopy of this letter). Faust furthered her focus on “notions of justice, equality and patriotism” at Bryn Mawr College as a student activist and protester against Jim Crow and the Vietnam War. Her epilogue closes on a note of hope, looking ahead to the moment in 2008 when her home state of Virginia “cast its electoral ballots for the first Black president.” Faust pulls off a brilliant synthesis, grounding the macro stresses of the period in her quest to distance herself from her culture of origin and sharpen her political sensibilities. A follow-up volume exploring her life after 1968 would be more than welcome. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“A thrilling chronicle of awakening and activism.” —Jessica Ferri, The Washington Post
“Shining forth is the resolve to fight for equity that has shaped [Faust’s] life, through her youthful activism as a college student in the 1960s and, later, as a historian of the South.” —Martha Southgate, The New York Times Book Review
"[An] exquisitely reasoned and elegantly written memoir . . . a necessary perspective for today." —Diane Cole, The Wall Street Journal
“Faust has gone back to a foreign country—America when post-1945 conventions and complacencies began to crumble—and has returned with a needed gift for today’s nation: an example of mature assessment.” —George Will, The Washington Post
"In a powerful new memoir, Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust details her experiences shedding the expectations of her insulated upbringing and the thoughtful courage it took to transcend the antiquated racial and gender biases of the time. This intricate narrative encapsulates the not-so-pleasant conflicts many struggled to overcome during the turbulent post-World War II period. Few overcame as successfully as Dr. Faust, and this publication should inspire those of us confronting similar challenges in today’s America." —Congressman James E. Clyburn
"Such a wonderful book. I can’t wait to give copies to my daughters. All young women should read this book. And everyone else, too." —Sally Mann, author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
"This is a really terrific book, and I cannot urge people more to read it because it's so personal and so beautifully written." —Fareed Zakaria
“In Necessary Trouble [Faust] has given us a cogent, clear-eyed account of a violent, vexed era and a glimpse of the first part of a considered life. Perhaps some of her good sense and moral strenuousness will rub off, enough to help us cope with our own turbulent time.” —Adam Begley, The Spectator
“Drew Gilpin Faust’s memoir is both a moving personal narrative and an enlightening account of the transformative political and social forces that impacted her as she came of age in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s an apt combination from an acclaimed historian who’s also a powerful storyteller.” —Barbara Spindel, Christian Science Monitor
"[Necessary Trouble] lays out a great life story in how very small acts of courage make a remarkable difference in creating one's legacy. For those who sometimes hold back, to not be uncomfortable, this book is an inspiration in action." —Michael Gale, Forbes
"Faust nimbly blends the personal and the political in this affecting memoir . . . Faust pulls off a brilliant synthesis, grounding the macro stresses of the period in her quest to distance herself from her culture of origin and sharpen her political sensibilities." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Necessary Trouble is a beautifully rendered coming-of-age narrative of a sensitive young woman—raised in a conservative white family of privilege in rural Virginia horse country—whose growing awareness of the suffocating conventions of gender gradually awakens her to the inequities of race. Through superb storytelling and delightfully lyrical prose, Drew Faust demonstrates, day-to-day, the inextricable interplay of class, gender, and race in mid-twentieth century America far more effectively than a scholarly treatise could ever achieve. Necessary Trouble is destined to be a classic of American memoir.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
"This gem of a memoir is a triumph. Drew Faust's rich portrait of the South she grew up in and how she and it went through radical transformation is a necessary book for our times." —Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
"An inviting, absorbing look at a privileged childhood in the segregated South and the birth of a questioning spirit." —Kirkus Reviews
"Drew Gilpin Faust speaks to us here not as Harvard's former president but as a member of a generation that had to navigate a world very different from the one it was born into. The result is a spectacular coming-of-age memoir that is at once deeply personal and highly relevant." —Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Justice on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court
"This riveting, brave, and poignant memoir shows historian Drew Faust at her best, placing her own youth on the map of history. While revealingly personal, Necessary Trouble is also a larger story of generational, gender, and racial divides, and of wars domestic and foreign. Faust’s account of growing beyond a Southern family hamstrung by its past, and transforming her sights via 'the movement' for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, stirringly evokes the moral seriousness impelling the rebellious 1960s generation." —Nancy F. Cott, author of Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home between the Wars
“Necessary Trouble makes for necessary reading: Drew Faust's riveting memoir describes a youth lived in the tumult of American history, from her privileged but uneasy childhood in the South (as a girl of nine she wrote to Eisenhower to condemn segregation) to her early engagement, as a high school and college student, in the vital progressive causes of the 60s, building alliances behind the Iron Curtain, participating in anti-war protests and, most abidingly, fighting for racial justice. Harvard University's first woman president offers us a narrative at once challenging and inspiring, and a way of living in these still, or newly, uncertain times." —Claire Messud, author of Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays
“For those of us that lived through that period [the 50s and 60s], this book is an important reminder that we should never forget. For those who were not yet born, the book brings the period to life. The reader learns about a life dedicated to 'learning and examining, suffused with a sense of purpose.' That purpose for Faust has focused on social justice and seeking the truth . . . John Lewis would be proud that this book is entitled Necessary Trouble.” —Freeman A. Hrabowski III, President Emeritus of UMBC
#1 New York Times bestselling author Walter Isaacson
“This gem of a memoir is a triumph.”
Barnes&Noble.com
“In an easy meld of memoir and cultural history, the distinguished Civil War historian and former president of Harvard recounts her transition from southern white privilege to Sixties political activism, chasing the arc of justice.”
president emeritus of UMBC Freeman A. Hrabowski III
“John Lewis would be proud that this book is entitled Necessary Trouble.”
Christian Science Monitor
“Both a moving personal narrative and an enlightening account of the transformative political and social forces that impacted her as she came of age in the 1950s and ’60s.”
Library Journal
11/03/2023
Historian and former Harvard president Faust (This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, has written a memoir that covers a bit of her family history and focuses on historical events between the 1957 launching of Sputnik and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. That includes the Hungarian Revolution, the threat of nuclear war, the beginning of the civil rights movement, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the building of the Berlin Wall. Faust grew up in 1950s Virginia, which was only 17 percent Black. There were no segregationist signs on water fountains, park benches, or waiting rooms, yet the only Black adults she knew worked for her family and used a separate servant's bathroom. She says segregation was foundational to her upbringing, along with gender roles and anticommunism. In 1957, when she was nine, she became aware that she was white, she says. Realizing that her school had no Black children in it, she wrote to President Eisenhower to express her outrage. VERDICT This memoir by a white historian is a necessary addition to collections. She come to terms with her racial past and learns how to affect change.—Amy Cheney
NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile
This memoir by the distinguished historian and past president of Harvard is ably narrated by the author, though at times her voice lacks the variation that a professional might bring. The result is a somber review of an unhappy youth spent rebelling against staid conventions of womanhood and whiteness. Covering the period from her childhood in the 1950s to her college graduation in 1968, the audiobook describes how her youthful interests shaped her professional future. A Civil Rights activist, she also protested the war in Vietnam, organized her classmates against sexist double standards, and later wrote two important books about the Civil War. Listeners learn about her unhappy but privileged childhood in Virginia, which prompted her decision to dedicate her life to social justice. L.W.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-04-24
A distinguished historian remembers coming-of-age in the 1950s and ’60s.
Faust, a Bancroft and Francis Parkman Prize winner and former president of Harvard, examines her personal history in a memoir set between her 1947 birth and her 1968 graduation from Bryn Mawr. In the early chapters, the author resurrects the Virginia of her White, privileged childhood, touching on her father’s racehorse business and emotional coldness; her mother’s desire that she grow up a meek and passive “lady” (“I was not meant to become a woman, for that category carried dangerously sexual and sensual implications”); her brother’s backyard Civil War reenactments (he made her play Grant to his Lee); the family’s unspoken belief that they deserved every advantage they had; and their staff of Black cleaners and cooks who used the back door and ate in the kitchen. In the rest of the book, Faust chronicles her flight from the racial and gendered assumptions of her upbringing. She wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower in favor of desegregation, skipped midterms to participate in civil rights protests, endured an assault by a National Guard member in Alabama, rallied against the war in Vietnam, and organized her college classmates against sexist double standards. The author is at her best when she immerses readers in a young person’s experience of the era’s moral urgency and passion, illuminating how “coming of age as a thinking and feeling person in those years [was] like walking on the edge of a precipice.” It was an era whose specific clashes “fewer and fewer living humans can remember” and whose “strangeness…can perhaps encourage us that at least some things have changed for the better in my lifetime.” And yet, writes Faust, “when we see many of those advances challenged or even overturned, it can remind us why we don’t want to live in such a world again.”
An inviting, absorbing look at a privileged childhood in the segregated South and the birth of a questioning spirit.
