Anyone who reads the first chapter of Warren’s autobiography will be struck by how difficult an argument it is to make the “elite” charge stick. In it, she takes the reader through a whirlwind tour of her upbringing (in Oklahoma, no less): Her dad’s heart attack led to him losing his steady-paying job and the family car being repossessed. Young Elizabeth contributed to the family income by baby-sitting, selling puppies, and sewing dresses. The family’s weak financial standing cast doubt on the possibility of her going to college, but her debating skills resulted in a scholarship to George Washington University. She then abandoned her scholarship after marriage at age 19, but she moved to Texas and earned a degree at the University of Houston, then took her first full-time job as a speech therapist for special-needs children. She gave birth to a daughter and enrolled in Rutgers Law School in New Jersey because “lawyers were always fighting to defend good people who needed help.” Her second pregnancy made it difficult for her to find work because “no one invited me for a second interview.” She decided to hang out her own shingle and also took a part-time job teaching legal writing. She then moved back to Houston and took a full-time job as a law professor at the University of Houston, while being backstopped on the childcare front by her Aunt Bee, who was in her late 70s. She divorced her husband who, when she asked him if he wanted a divorce, responded, “No hesitation, just yes.” Harvard Law School did not come calling until Warren was well into her 40s.

For those who have toiled for decades on policy issues, Warren’s stories on the policy aspects of her work and the positions they led to will be inspiring. Her stories are in stark contrast to other key members of the Obama administration, like Timothy Geithner who did not do much substantive research or writing for public consumption until after he completed his tenure as treasury secretary.

What causes bankruptcy? / For Warren, it all started with a burning question from her work teaching a bankruptcy class at the University of Texas: “Why were these people broke?” This led her to partner with co-authors Terry Sullivan and Jay Westbrook to “collect hard data about families that went broke,” which culminated in her first book, As We Forgive Our Debtors. According to Warren, the book transformed the study of bankruptcy from one of “theory” to one based more on an actual database drawn from bankruptcy cases.

This research led her to her first “political” work in Washington as a senior adviser for the staff of the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, which was established in 1995 to review the bankruptcy laws. She juggled that work with a job teaching at Harvard and it led to her first meeting with Senator Kennedy, who championed her views on bankruptcy law. Her opposition to pending reform measures ultimately went down to defeat in 2005 with the passage of bankruptcy reform legislation that she saw as a big gift to the banks. Warren describes the experience in bitter terms: “David really did get the slingshot shoved down his throat sideways.”

Protecting the banks’ ‘fannies’ / Her next stop on the Washington policy tour was an invitation in November 2008 from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D‑Nev.) to work on the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) scrutinizing the operational decisions for the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout.

Compared to bankruptcy reform legislation, Warren was much more out of her element in this position. She was not familiar with the role of COP and had to look it up in the TARP legislation after Reid offered her the position. She was also oblivious to the lack of transparency that the Treasury and Federal Reserve had displayed regarding key information for the bailouts. This is revealed in her reaction to her first meeting with Neel Kashkari, who oversaw the bailouts for Treasury. He told the COP staff that the big bailouts were over, only to have Warren find out two days later that Citi was to receive a fresh $20 billion in TARP funds:

I was stunned—and furious. I understood that this was a crisis, and I knew that sensitive information might need to be closely held. I also understood that we might be asked to keep something confidential for a period of time or even that some official might say, “I can’t tell you that right now” and explain why. But that wasn’t what happened…. [Treasury] sent us out of the room knowing we believed that the big bailouts were over and knowing exactly how wrong that belief was.

Anyone following the bailout story closely should have been familiar with the struggles of financial reporting service Bloomberg and its lawsuit filed about this same time against the Federal Reserve to get basic financial information on its wide-ranging bailouts.

Notwithstanding having to play catch-up on bailout details for much of her time as chair of COP, Warren expressed appropriate skepticism that the banks needed to be bailed out and she pressed both Geithner and his predecessor, Henry Paulson, on the efficacy of the TARP program. One of the better quotes from the book summarizes Geithner’s philosophy: “[T]he secretary of the Treasury believed that government’s most important job was to provide a soft landing for the tender fannies of the banks.” COP also did some particularly good analysis regarding what the big banks did with the TARP money: “[Some] did exactly the opposite of what TARP was supposed to encourage…. [T]hey cut back on small-business lending.” Meanwhile, the inequities in treatment were clear: as in contrast to the larger banks, the smaller banks were subjected to market forces (as well they should have been): “Some died while waiting [for TARP funds]…. [N]early fifty small banks had gone completely under—and many more were drowning.”

CFPB / The next move for Warren was to work on getting approval for the creation of what is now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an idea that Warren reveals “had been knocking around in my head for a while.” In 2007 she set to writing an article using an analogy to a toaster and the fact that there is a government agency in Washington that “actually monitored toasters for basic safety.… But in 2007 there was no government agency that would stop the sale of exploding mortgages.” But that year President Bush was still in office and Warren had little hope for her dream to come to fruition.

Then the financial crisis came and the Obama administration entered the picture. (Cue Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste…. [I]t’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”) Warren raised the idea of a consumer financial protection agency with Obama economic adviser Larry Summers in early 2009. President Obama later used her toaster analogy on the Jay Leno show in the early days of his first term. Ultimately the Treasury Department outlined the prototype for a CFPB in its white paper on financial reform and, after fighting with the banks, the enabling framework for the agency was ultimately codified in the Dodd-Frank Act.

Black and white hats / Warren’s pet projects put her in the middle of multiple fights in Washington, thus the name of the book: A Fighting Chance. Advocates of limited government will notice that when she narrates each “fight,” she assumes the “good guys” “who spend their lives fighting for the well-being of regular folks” are the folks who advocate big government. This ignores some important facts.

For example, Barney Frank “was a champion for the good guys” who was leading financial reform, but he was also a key enabler of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the pre-crisis buildup. Meanwhile, during the bankruptcy fight, Warren brands as bad guys the banks that simply wanted to make it nominally easier to collect their debts, while ignoring the role of bankruptcy attorneys who pushed consumers into bankruptcy and were fighting equally hard in their own interest to prevent those changes. She lauds the Clinton administration for fighting the banks and the credit card companies by vetoing the industry bankruptcy bill, but she doesn’t recount how President Clinton pushed for housing policies to expand homeownership, which contributed to the housing bubble that was the genesis of the 2007–2008 crisis. On the CFPB, Warren demands the creation of a new government behemoth, but without a hint of irony she mentions that there already are “more than a dozen federal laws … involving consumer credit” and “seven different federal agencies” that exist to enforce them that “the good guys” created years and decades earlier.

Politics / The final act of Warren’s narrative is her 2012 Senate campaign. She casts her opponent, then-senator Scott Brown, as essentially an empty suit, which, if her statements of the facts are accurate, is probably not far off the mark. For example, Brown took a cheap shot in a radio interview about Warren’s looks. “Thank God,” he responded when the interviewer asked him what he thought of her comment at a debate that she did not—unlike Brown—pose nude to help pay for her education. In the same interview he also drew on the Harvard elite line of argument: “Bottom line is, you know, I didn’t go to Harvard.” In fact, neither did Warren; she only taught there. In their first debate, as a sitting senator, his major attack line was not on a substantive policy matter, but instead on a non-issue regarding Warren’s purported abusive leveraging of her American Indian heritage to advance her career. In all, not a pretty picture of the likely Republican nominee for the New Hampshire Senate seat in 2014.

Overall, this book is a good read for anyone who has followed the key financial policy issues of the past two decades—even for those who disagree with Warren’s stands on those issues. She keeps the story interesting from her early days as a lonely researcher through her high-profile Senate campaign. Her detailed endnotes are a breath of fresh air when compared to many other books on the financial crisis that either present cryptic citations or do not present any citations at all. Her methods of on-point, detailed research regarding timely financial sector issues combined with her passion and persistence for her policy work can be a useful template for any participant in public policy debates.