A Woman of Substance
Review by Dan Smith
Blue Ridge Business Journal
November 6th, 2006

You have to believe that H.L. Hunt is restless in his grave these days because of the youngest daughter of his second wife. Hunt, a Texas oilman who had two wives, a mistress and 15 children, among whom he divvied up his billions upon his death in 1974, was an “anti-philanthropy” kind of guy, says Swanee Hunt in her new-and fascinating-autobiography Half-Life of a Zealot (Duke University Press, $29.95). His daughter was a lot of other things he wasn’t as well, including a liberal, an activist and a woman who gives away millions a year to help those who need it most.

Swanee Hunt was Bill Clinton’s Ambassador to Austria; a key cog in Women Waging Peace, which integrates women in the peace process; writer of “Witness Cantata,” a classical music memorial to war victims; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a network political commentator; president of Hunt Alternative Fund; an internationally known photographer; the wife of a symphony conductor and mother of three, one of whom has a serious mental illness. She’s the director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and author of This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Re-Claiming the Peace. She has two master’s degrees, a Ph. D. and three honorary degrees.

Accomplished enough for you? She’s her daddy’s daughter in the sense that she is an overachiever but boy she not the parsimonious H.L.’s political heir! Nor is she boring. Good book. Inspiring woman.