Against All Odds: A Memoir

Scott Brown's greatest win did not occur on a cold January election night in 2010 when he came from behind to capture the U.S. Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for nearly fifty years. It began when he survived a savage beating at the drunken, dirty-finger nail hands of a stepfather when he was barely six years old. In this gripping memoir of resilience and redemption, Scott Brown tells the story of his lonely, nomadic life, shunted from house to apartment, and town-to-town, sixteen times over his first eighteen years. He survived a largely absent father who spun elaborate tales of his own success but never displayed a single photo of his young son. His mother married four separate times, in relationships stained with alcohol, anger, and violence. For nearly two decades, Brown endured hunger and quasi-abandonment, periodically shunted off to live with relatives, his possessions wrapped in a few old blankets. Saved by basketball, he was the boy who shoveled snow off the public courts to shoot hoop alone in the frozen cold.
With clear-eyed conviction and unflinching candor, Brown tells the story of his own bad-boy days, of the coaches who mentored him, and of how he found a way out of familial chaos through the swish of a ball in the net, winning a starting slot on the Tufts Varsity basketball team and becoming the tenth highest scorer to graduate in the school's history. His rise from there was meteoric: a freshman law student and member of the Massachusetts National Guard, he was picked as Cosmopolitan magazine's "America's Sexiest Man," and was vaulted into the glamorous world of New York modeling at the height of the 1980s. But the man who was once ushered into the back room of Studio 54 returned to Massachusetts to settle down, raise a family, and soon found an unlikely path that would lead him to national political stardom. Here too are the secrets from the unprecedented Senate race that captured the country's imagination and how Scott Brown won his remarkable victory.
Moving, heartfelt, funny, and profound, LONG SHOT is the story of one man's dream and his determination to fight for a better future.