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Overview
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
In 2002, award-winning film and stage actor Ashley Judd found her true calling: as a humanitarian and voice for those suffering in neglected parts of the world. After her first trip to the notorious brothels, slums, and hospices of southeast Asia, Ashley knew immediately that she wanted to advocate on behalf of the vulnerable. During her travels, Ashley started to write diaries that detailed extraordinary stories of survival and resilience. But along the way, she realized that she was struggling with her own emotional pain, stemming from childhood abandonment and abuse. Seeking in-patient treatment in 2006 for the grief that had nearly killed her, Ashley found not only her own recovery and an enriched faith but the spiritual tools that energized and advanced her feminist social justice work. In this deeply moving and unforgettable memoir, Ashley Judd describes her odyssey, from lost child to fiercely dedicated advocate, from anger and isolation to forgiveness and activism. In telling it, she answers the ineffable question about the relationship between healing oneself and service to others.
Foreword by Nicholas D. Kristof
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Ashley Judd is an award-winning actress, the daughter of country music singer Naomi Judd, and the half sister of country singing legend Wynonna Judd, but this memoir is no cookie cutter celebrity autobiography. Born out of her first trip to Southeast Asia's most heart-wrenching slums, All That is Bitter & Sweet recounts Judd's struggles to place her new call as a humanitarian within the context of her own busy, troubled life. By rethinking the causes of her own emotional pain, she learns to empathize and cope with crises in the world around her. Straight from the heart; bound to receive the media attention it deserves. Now in trade paperback and NOOK Book. (P.S. The trade paperback edition carries a new afterword by the author.)
— Edward Ash-Milby
Charlotte Hays
Judd keeps her acting career offstage. You won't learn much about how she got from her native Kentucky to Hollywood stardom. This book is about recovery from depression born of growing up in a wildly dysfunctional family and building on that recovery to become a global activist. Yet All That Is Bitter and Sweet is not nearly as saccharine as this description makes it sound. Despite the heavy dose of jargon and cliche…the actress tells a fascinating story about her truly awful childhood.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
It's widely known that Ashley Judd is a popular actress, with a roster of both large and small films on her CV, and hails from the same family that produced a country music sensation, but Judd is also a dedicated philanthropist and a global ambassador for Population Services International (PSI). In this frank and heartfelt memoir, Judd reveals the tumultuous and abusive childhood that led her to wrestle with anger and abandonment. She worked through these issues in therapy in order to recommit to both her acting and her role as an advocate for sex workers and public health issues. Skeptics, who think of Judd as another actress out of her depth, should be quieted by Judd's completion of a masters degree at Harvard University in 2010, better equipping her to carry on her mission of social justice. In his foreword, Kristof calls Judd a serious advocate following "a calling." On paper she is sensitive, thoughtful, devoid of narcissism or unnecessary drama, and shows superb judgment in collaborating with Vollers, whose 2007 book Lone Wolf, about abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, was excellent. Judd's resolve and dedication to her work is humbling and inspiring, and her memoir is fantastic. (Apr.)Library Journal
Actress Judd is also a committed activist who received a master's in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (pretty cool). Here, she draws on journals she kept while attending to human rights issues worldwide, using what she experienced to help rethink her own life. Should get some attention.Kirkus Reviews
With the assistance of co-author Vollers (Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph: Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw, 2006, etc.), actress Judd delivers a keenly felt memoir of a dysfunctional upbringing twined with an adult life of progressive social advocacy.
Some wag once said that the Judd family put the "fun" in dysfunctional, but Ashley remembers the turbulence rather differently, as "a family full of hatred, fighting, accusation, manipulation, abandonment, and emotional and physical abuse," with everything "from depression, suicide, alcoholism, and compulsive gambling to incest and suspected murder. Judd examines her difficult history, braiding it with her current days as a committed activist for human rights. Though she calls readers' attention to her movie-star status as she rubs humanitarian-circuit shoulders with Bono, Juanes ("the Colombian rock superstar") and Bollywood's Akshay Kumar ("the Indian equivalent of Will Smith or Bruce Willis, but with a fan base of a billion people"), she also comes across as a piercingly effective global ambassador for Population Services International, tackling issues of reproductive health and child survival. At first, she was undone by her visits to third-world brothels, but she eventually realized that her own sexual abuse was causing the over-identification, subverting her agenda. "I understand the urge to rescue everybody," says her PSI boss, "but that's not how it works. PSI is not a rescue organization. We are a public health organization." The author writes with a sure hand of the many difficult themes she addresses: her journey of emotional recovery (a fine chapter on her rehab for codependency and depression), her spiritual quest, finding the humanity in the sexual perpetrators and making tangible her toils for social justice. Judd is also a solid painter of place, from the most squalid sex factory to the rural sweetness of her Tennessee home.
A passionate reminder of the breathtaking misery of so many lives, and one woman's work in their service.