A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir
Jacinda Ardern uses her new memoir to make a clear and compelling case for compassion ... Her anecdotes will resonate with any working mother ... If A Different Kind of Power suffers from its author’s earnestness, particularly in the mundane descriptions of her childhood, Ardern compensates by injecting humor.
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Ardern is a disarmingly likable, warm and funny narrator, as gloriously informal on the page as she seems in person. A policeman’s daughter, raised within the Mormon church in a rural community down on its luck, she paints a vivid picture of herself as conscientious, anxious, and never really sure she was good enough for the job ... Her book feels constructed for an international audience ...
But while all this makes for an emotionally rich and candid read, the downside of skipping the political detail is that it’s hard to get a sense of how exactly her astonishing early popularity ebbed away ... She’s also notably keener to dwell on what her tenure says about kindness and empathy being powerful mechanisms for changing lives than she is to engage with the critique that she failed to deliver on some of her more tangible promises around alleviating poverty.
Nonetheless, I closed the book feeling a pang of nostalgia for a time when scrapping tax cuts and spending the money on a more generous safety net, or clasping immigrants to a nation’s heart, (as she did after Christchurch) still seemed completely plausible things for a prime minster to advocate. A different kind of power, for what now feels like a sadly different world.
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Don’t read this book ... Reads like a 350-page transcript of a therapy session ... Large sections are dedicated to an uneventful youth in Murupara ...
Don’t get me wrong: it’s good to be reminded that politicians are human beings, and healthy that a modern woman can both have a baby and run New Zealand. But between all the paragraphs on childrearing and pump-sterilising...one gets the impression that there was little else to do ... So much ink is given to relationship talk and cake baking...that it starts to feel as though the author’s self-doubt lies not in her leadership skills, but in a fear that people can’t see how nice she really is ... The author’s virtue may be signalled brightly enough to be seen from the moon—and yet this empathy curiously doesn’t extend to every critic of her Covid policy ... The principle that the world would be a better place if we just empathised with each other is nice in theory, but codswallop in practice ... By reducing all government to thoughts and prayers, she transformed humility into vanity—a softly photographed carnival of her own emotions.
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