What I Know For Sure
Oprah Winfrey, 2014
Flatiron Books
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250054050
Summary
As a creative force, student of the human heart and soul, and champion of living the life you want, Oprah Winfrey stands alone.
Over the years, she has made history with a legendary talk show—the highest-rated program of its kind, launched her own television network, become the nation's only African-American billionaire, and been awarded both an honorary degree by Harvard University and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
From all her experiences, she has gleaned life lessons—which, for fourteen years, she's shared in O, The Oprah Magazine's widely popular "What I Know For Sure" column, a monthly source of inspiration and revelation.
Now, for the first time, these thoughtful gems have been revised, updated, and collected in What I Know For Sure, a beautiful cloth bound book with a ribbon marker, packed with insight and revelation from Oprah Winfrey.
Organized by theme—joy, resilience, connection, gratitude, possibility, awe, clarity, and power—these essays offer a rare, powerful and intimate glimpse into the heart and mind of one of the world's most extraordinary women—while providing readers a guide to becoming their best selves.
Candid, moving, exhilarating, uplifting, and frequently humorous, the words Oprah shares in What I Know For Sure shimmer with the sort of truth that readers will turn to again and again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 29, 1954
• Where—Kosciusko, Mississippi, USA
• Raised—Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Education—high school
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—maintains homes in New York, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Florida, and New Jersey
Oprah Gail Winfre is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.
Dubbed the "Queen of All Media," she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is currently North America's only black billionaire. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.
Background
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, saying she was raped at age nine and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is credited with having popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study says broke 20th-century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.
By the mid-1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and an emotion-centered approach, she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. From 2006 to 2008, her support of Barack Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race. (Excerpted from Wikipedia. For more information, see the full version.)
Book Reviews
The 14 years during which this book’s contents were written (in her Oprah Magazine column) were eventful ones for “The Queen of All Media.” ...The events and the span of those years lend a sense of evolving consciousness to the dozens of...essays compiled in this ribbon-markered, clothbound bible of a book. If you’ve read, heard, watched, prayed to, or memorialized the gospel according to Oprah, there will be much to delight you here, and few surprises.
Boston Globe
Gentle and supportive, while concise and sincere, these brief observations invite readers to five minutes of quiet contemplation. Ask yourself what you know for sure, Winfrey says, and “what you’ll find along the way will be fantastic, because what you’ll find will be yourself.”
Publishers Weekly
Winfrey takes each moment and finds the good in it, takes pride in having lived it and embraces the message she’s received from that particular time.... [S]he shows readers how she's turned potentially negative moments into life-enhancing experiences...and found bliss in simple pleasures.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for What I Know For Sure:
1. What does Oprah say about the importance of time? Why is time so important to her? How important is time your own life? How well do you make use of it?
2. How has Oprah's relationship to her body, specifically the numbers on the scale, affected her life? Talk about how her thoughts about her body have evolved over time. Does her discussion of weight have any resonance with you?
3. In what ways—and more importantly, why—do we allow others' perceptions shape how we see ourselves? How does Oprah suggest protecting, even enhancing, our sense of self-worth? What determines an somene's "worth"? In fact, what is individual worth, how do you define it?
4. In the book Oprah says, "Anything can be a miracle, a blessing, an opportunity if you choose to see it that way." Is she right? Is our ability to face up to our troubles—some truly dire, even fatal—a matter of attitude? Does that hold true for you or others you know? How can attitude affect outcome?
4. Talk about gratitude. What does Oprah say about its role in life? How grafeful are you—and what are you grateful for? Is it easy to feel gratitude?
5. The definition of "crisis" is a turning point. Oprah says, "Right now, no matter where you are, you are a single choice away from a new beginning." How can we apply that to the crises in our own lives?
6. Are the lessons in this book valuable? Have any of them touched you personally, given you pause, and made you examine your own life? Can reading a book like What I Know For Sure change lives?
7. How would you describe What I Know For Sure? Is it a book of practical advice...or a spiritual guide? Is it a rehash of tired ideas and bromides...or are its ideas fresh and insightful?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)