Customer Reviews

My Life: The Early Years

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Presidents write for history. When having to produce dozens of papers on political figures, one comes to treasure those apparently trivial incidents that seem to so annoy some of your reviewers. Biographies are judged according to their richness of detail, and this one deserves its excellent professional literary reviews. An easy story-telling style is frosting-on-the-cake of this presidential account that will be highly valued by history, if not by contemporary political opponents.

This book is titled "The Early Years" and stops just before the inaugural festivities in 1993. Having skimmed that later material in the full-length edition of this book, I would describe that as "Here's my story and I'm sticking to it." But the half in this book has less need for Clinton to cling to his usual talking points about his innocence, since it covers his growing up, schooling, and gubernatorial career. Unfortunately, instead of being sunk by Clinton's avoidance of responsibility, this part is sunk by another fault of his: cheap talk with little payout.

By that, I mean that Clinton takes his sweet time going over every little item in his life, but often with no real reason to. Here's an example: he says, "First I went to x. It was great. I got lost on the subway but a nice man helped me find the way. He said something I'll always remember: watch the signs. What earthy wisdom." Obviously this is made up for effect, but it is like that: Clinton has no editing ability to tell him when to expound upon a subject and when to cut to the chase and get to the point. If he did, he'd find there often is little or no point. Many of the asides he takes are 1. about other people and of no significance (apparently Clinton just wanted to give all his buddies some face time) and 2. not even very funny or interesting. But they come at a relentless pace: not very good stories about people you don't know or care about. So it is that Clinton must relate something bad that happened to his Boys State friend, or repeat some complaint one of his professors once shared, and so on.

The book is padded out with this kind of material. And when there's an important event, like the RFK killing, does Clinton only go on if he has something to add? Nope. He'll say, "My friend woke me and told me." Thanks for that scintillating story. It would have been ok if he'd actually had something to relate, but instead he only recites the details of the funeral (and the circumstances of the shooting - "A disgruntled Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan shot him as he was walking through the kitchen") as if we never heard of it. So it is that he tells us about the bombing halt, and a whole slew of other events as they occur, in much greater detail than is necessary, as if we all live in caves. My point is that instead of saying how these events impacted him personally and are relevant to the story (and if they aren't, passing them over), Clinton just works his way through describing everything that happened between 1948 and 1993, without regard to any larger theme or connection with his subject (himself).

Even when he is governor and there is more substance to pass on, Clinton still can't resist telling us that thing that once happened to a friend of his while they were out in some rural county getting ready to start campaigning. And trust me, the thing that happened is never very funny or insightful. This helps explain why Clinton's presidential jokes were so bad: he doesn't know a good story from a bad one, but talks anyway because hell, that's what you do in Arkansas. Sadly, this makes his book pretty annoying.

All this could have been cut to bring out the real story. Doing it could have reduced this portion of the book by 200 pages. But instead you have to wade through a lot to get to it.

One other flaw: the power of biography is starting with a simple story of grandparents or something and ending up with someone who, for example, won WWII. But there is no building upsweep here, because Clinton keeps cutting in to say things like, "When I was president, I went to his funeral. I'll always remember how he loaned me 25 cents that day" or some other pointless thing that ruins the flow. Either that, or he disposes of people in one fell swoop: Jocelyn Elders gets introduced as an Arkansas health appointee, then Bill tells us why he let her go in 1994, then it's back to the rest of 1989. Proper storytelling structure it's not.

The best presidential memoir I've read is Nixon's (I've read LBJ's, Ford's, Carter's, and what Bush has written). Nixon knew how to be relevant. Clinton doesn't.

It was an insightful, warm, down-to-earth, and honest telling of the story of the life (so far) of one of the most intelligent and human of all of our Presidents. It was also a wonderful political history of the times in which he lived.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a Clinton supporter, I voted for him twice and thought I would really enjoy this book. It started out great--nice down-to-earth writing style, interesting anecdotes, really enjoyable read. But then it degenerated into....politics, which I suppose I should have been prepared for. In that sense, it is a great book for historians. I wanted to read about the personal side of the man, not about who he appointed to every post and who did every last job on each and every one of his campaigns. I won't be reading The Presidential Years--this one actually did take me all summer to read because it was so boring. Two stars is a little harsh, but at least I can say that I finished it. Sorry, Bill.

Even though I had the chance to live through the years that Bill Clinton was president, I cannot believe how much of the Clinton years I had forgotten. Bill has a great sense of humor and is a great storyteller with compassion, grace and style. He is one of my favorite presidents of all time. A great read. It made me want to know more about his early years growing up in Arkansas.

As someone who has written a lot on Bill Clinton I eagerly awaited the release of his biography. It met most of my expectations although at times he put in far more than I needed to or cared to know. Nigel Hamilton does an excellent job in his early years biography and it matches most of what Clinton talks about here. The need for Bill Clinton to please everyone around him really comes out in his own biography and while I feel he skirts around his disagreement with Carter and does not express the anger that most sources say he felt it is a very honest attempt. I would have liked more details about his college years and meeting Hillary which he jumps past fairly quickly and gets into their political relationship. It is very well written which is to be expected from someone as educated as Bill Clinton.

As I said to my fellow authors earlier, Bill's one of us. He's a writer. This isn't about agreeing with his politics, by the way. It's about, as the book title implies, his life. Which, as luck would have it, does feature a whole lot of politics. I can picture professors building courses around this book, and I think that'is probably a good thing. In China we use FORREST GUMP, which is quite good, but in the US let's go for the gold. MY LIFE goes way below the surface.

Bill Clinton has an amazing memory, in addition to detailed notes and journals and such, and he takes us on a very candid journey. It's almost like being an imbedded journalist. We start with a country boy and many southern tales, then move through some "small town hick in the big city" tales that include Oxford and the soul-searching of the Vietnam War years, then finally through his lengthy political career, one year at a time. Campaigns for others, then for himself. A lot of politics when he's in office.

Politics doesn't simply bore me. I find them downright painful. But I must admit that I've wondered where presidents come from. When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a writer, a teacher or perhaps a cop. Or an NFL quarterback, but I realized early on that might be a tad unrealistic. But president? It never occurred to me. Why did it occur to the poor bumbling fat kid from Arkansas? Read his book and you'll know the answer.

I admire anyone who can pull together a wide variety of seemingly contradictory influences into a consistent whole. You've seen me try to do it in this newsletter, and you can see Bill Clinton do it in this book. Those who equate "thinking" with "waffling" just don't get it. Quite probably they quit subscribing to THIS rag ages ago, if they ever found it at all. So I don't write for them. I write for you.

I'm reaching the age where it's getting very hard to find a non-fiction writer older than me writing about events that I find interesting. Bill qualifies. It's very good to watch history unfold through his eyes. The events I lived through and remember, the ones that preceded those, the ones I just plain missed because I was too busy with other things. One of life's little ironies is that I missed some of Bill's efforts to unburden the lower class because I was too busy shouldering that burden.

This is a 957-page monster, folks. It's a big-un, and it's largely narrative. I've been at it for maybe two weeks. There's no law saying you can't take longer. Stop to read something else, come back to it later, whatever. I'm glad I'm reading it. I think you will be too. (It helps to be American.) Heck, I think you already have read it and I'm just preaching to the choir over here. But hey, Mikey likes it.

I like a story that takes its time and give me the details to make my own conclusions and that is just what Bill Clinton has done with his book. I didn't vote for him either time he ran for national office and I still enjoyed this book.

History will obviously be the most accurate Clinton biographer but for those of us who want to hear the man in his own words, this is quite a treat. Bill Clinton is a political animal--for better and for worse. But he is also a serious thinker with tremendous foresight (see for example his views in the 80s on free trade, globalization, and education). His voice has impacted American politics and culture; to understand the how and why, pick this book up.

Okay, so the man didn't exactly need redeeming in my eyes. I thought him a kind of hero before I picked up this book and think of him that way still, though now I have better reasons for it than his public humility, esteem on the world stage, and deft financing of public schools across the country. In his biography, Clinton plies his stock-in-trade, or better, his skill in spades, charm, to his life, both private and political, early and late. When was the last time a public figure acted with such transparency regarding his motives, failures, and frustrations? If he is guilty here of recasting his life favorably, as most biographers eventually are, it is not the usual kind of favoritism that has a large figure becoming mythic, larger-than-life. It is rather that he is uber-authentic, having been born of an alcoholic dad, and living aside an estranged and drug-addicted brother; these snapshots tend to emphasize his claim to the title "the nation's first black president," a street kid who made good through excessive pulling of bootstraps. Larger-than-life is precisely what Clinton is not in this story, but endearingly and precisely life-sized.