Kerry’s humble-bragging is most evident when he talks about his physical injuries. He recounts the story of a painful accident he suffered playing broom hockey in Sun Valley, Idaho, with some kids and his neighbor (perhaps you’ve heard of him: Tom Hanks).

Kerry broke his nose and bruised his face. Yet the secretary of state was needed in Oman. “I grabbed a pair of big black sunglasses and off I went,” he writes.

When Kerry was visiting Israel in 2009 as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he made it a point to visit Gaza over the objections of the US embassy in Israel. Touring a refugee camp, he just couldn’t stay in his armored car. So he got out to talk to a little girl playing by the road.

The resulting photo of Kerry “walking amid the rubble was worth more to the Palestinian people than a thousand statements,” Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas later told the senator, according to the senator.