Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America
by Robert B. Reich
View on GoodreadsRobert Reich's 2025 memoir — across his career as Labor Secretary, Berkeley professor, and progressive public intellectual — interwoven with his struggle with the height-related condition (multiple epiphyseal dysplasia) that has shaped his life in ways the public political figure has not foregrounded before.
Core ideas
- The personal frame is the book's most unusual move — Reich's 4'10" height has been a constant of his public life but rarely the subject; the memoir treats it as the formative experience of being repeatedly underestimated, dismissed, or bullied.
- The political-economy substance is continuous with The System and his earlier work — wage stagnation, oligarchic capture, the consolidation of corporate power — but presented through personal vignettes rather than structural argument.
- The Clinton administration material (the Labor Secretary years, the NAFTA fights, the eventual resignation) is reconstructed with more candor than Reich's earlier memoirs offered, particularly about his policy losses inside the administration.
Published2025
Pages416
ISBN9780593803288
ReadMar 2026
