By Harry Levins, Special to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
11/08/2009

Five years back, former U.S. Sen. Jean Carnahan gave us her autobiography, "Don't Let the Fire Go Out." Although the latest offering from the Missouri Democrat (now a St. Louis resident) packs a lot of autobiographical detail, "The Tide Always Come Back" takes a different tack. Call this terse little book an inspirational guide, or a how-to-live-life manual. Or call it what Carnahan calls it: "homilies."

Her chapters amount to sermons wrapped around a single theme — accepting aging, for example (Carnahan is 75), or offering encouragement to others, or hanging on to one's faith. Sounds like ho-hum stuff. But like any good preacher, Carnahan knows how to keep an audience sitting up straight.

She steers her prose away from the abstract and toward the specific. For example, in telling why she prefers to chat with people her own age, she writes, "I enjoy the company of those whose recollections go back further than the Cuban Missile Crisis — someone who thinks Van Johnson was cute, has an appreciation for 'Lili Marlene' played on an accordion, or knows when to use the expression, 'hubba, hubba, zing, zing.'"

Carnahan sprinkles in apt quotations — she must be the best-read Missouri politician since Harry S Truman — and uses metaphors to put across many a point. In urging readers to persevere through adversity, she writes about a day in Germany when "I spotted a single, yellow blossom growing from a rock wall that bordered the sidewalk. Like Tennyson's 'crannied wall,' that wall appeared to be solid, yet somehow, defiantly and against all odds, the small flower had found a crack, pushed its way toward the light and blossomed triumphantly. Now, that's what I call attitude."

This book will find few readers among atheists, cynics and conservative Republicans. And truth be told, it goes down best in doses of one chapter at a time. But the author shows more humor than you'd expect from somebody whose ancestors were Virginia Calvinists — and more earnest faith than you'd expect from somebody who spent time in the United States Senate.

More reviews — Basil & Spice: Jean Carnahan Inspires, Educates With 'The Tide Always Comes Back'