...her book is about much more than just her dealings with Trump and Ailes. The story of her years as an attorney and her subsequent rise in TV journalism is surprisingly moving, transforming Settle for More into a Lean In-ish primer for young women about the importance of hard work, self-esteem, and—most of all—perseverance. Because say what you like about Kelly, she’s got grit, and lots of it.
...her memoir is a reminder that she is a complicated feminist figure — starting with the fact that she rejects the label 'feminist.' The needle she threads has an almost microscopic eye. She is trying simultaneously to appeal to both her new 'Lean-In' fan base and the regular Fox news watchers who abhor identity politics ... This book will doubtless have sex appeal among gossips and Kelly obsessives. But the author wants to do more than tell a juicy story. She’s positioned this book as a self-help guide ... Me, I’m not feeling it. Like most superstars, Ms. Kelly is a metabolic anomaly. She’s willed herself into her own spectacular existence. Along the way, she got the best of the next president of the United States. And the worst.
...meant to be an uplifting memoir about her impressive rise from middle-class Syracuse, N.Y., girl to one of America’s most successful news anchors, yet it’s her painful and disturbing account of what it means to be a high-profile female journalist in the age of Fox News, Twitter and Trump that resonates ... timing the book to come out a week after the election feels like somewhat of a cop out. Still, as Kelly’s personal story, the book is a testament to her resolve ... In prose that is simple, clean and straightforward, Kelly comes across in the book as casual and warm one minute, formal and stiff the next. It’s a duality that reflects her on-screen personality ... when she writes about her role at Fox, that personal awareness vanishes behind the tired gripes of the right about liberal values that we’ve grown accustomed to over a decade or more of brutally partisan media.
Kelly introduces us to a number of compelling characters ... It all comes with a twist of media irony, because this is a story told by a Fox News stalwart, though it didn’t air — and perhaps couldn’t have aired — on Fox News itself ... There are times when Kelly all but smacks the reader in the face with her scoop-preservation strategy ... Surely Kelly had her reasons for punting the story beyond the election. The threats against her were serious, and so were her efforts to counter them...Even so, journalists present stories when they’re relevant.
In a memoir that forthrightly details the harassment Kelly faced at Ailes’ hands, you might expect to find greater honesty about Fox News itself, and the political and ideological project that Kelly is in fact an integral part of. But no: Instead, Kelly reveals herself to be either a lot less canny than she seems or even cannier than she wants to let on. My money is on the latter ... The book itself is often as wholesome as apple pie, and as unwise to consume in large servings ... The Fox sections of the book are the most compelling, partially because Kelly’s rise at the network was so impressive, and partially because she describes people such as Ailes and Brit Hume in ways that are often vivid ... For all the disgust that she claims to feel for the misogyny and male entitlement of this soon-once-again-regnant America, and for all the personal harm it caused her, our bleak future is one in which Megyn Kelly is likely to find herself right at home.
Before you even get to page one, you know you’re not meeting Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. This is not the story of a warm and cozy girly-girl, all frills and fluff. Kelly knows she’s good as any, better than some ...the success story of a young woman who learned early in life that hard work will open any door that’s not already kicked in by great good looks. Her book is a testament to slogging, bone-cracking, round-the-clock effort, which she soldered to a laser focus to succeed ...memoir is also a love letter to her father... Overall, she writes with bawdy good humor and rarely 'half-asses it,' as she says.
...unfortunately, without the chapters about Mr. Trump and Mr. Ailes, the rest of the book reads like a 300-page motivational poste ... She writes about this without the slightest hint of irony, suggesting she’s not familiar with the concept of white privilege. It pervades the book, and it’s hard to believe that Ms. Kelly really doesn’t see that being an attractive white female might have innate advantages. That’s what’s weird about this memoir: It’s full of self-reflection without a lot of self-awareness. She repeatedly writes as if she’s giving herself a pep talk, inventing drama where there really isn’t any, and rationalizing or glossing over areas that could have benefited from more careful analysis.
