Reviews
I appreciated this book more than I thought I would. Since I listened to it as an audiobook, I have to comment on the narration. It could have been done better. Often the narrator would pause at odd moments, unprompted by punctuation. (That is a slight assumption on my part since I didn't have the text in front of me.) Her general inflection also left something to be desired. On the book itself: A reader must approach this book with the knowledge that it is a memoir and this subject to bias, sometimes of a relatively severe gradation. If a reader keeps that in mind, it is possible for a person to read and clean enormous amounts of information from this book. The biggest thing I gleaned was a more nuanced view of events that occurred during my impressionable childhood. Growing up in an extremely conservative environment, I had formed opinions of all those events and historical actors that lacked full investigation and were distinctly one-sided. No book is perfect and that certainly includes this one. Often Clinton will shift from national political topics to personal without any transition. That may be a fault of the format. It could be that the print copy of the book has something to mark those divisions. Other flaws include occasional over-dramatic language and a lack of information on topics that would seem to have affected her as a First Lady (as she states at the outset of the book as her primary goal) such as why she and Bill chose to have only one child. That being said, I really enjoyed reading about history that took place during my lifetime, things that I have distinct memories about. As far as memoirs go, this one's not bad. (I'll have to compare it to her husband's whenever I get a chance to read that one.)
