Review and Blog for Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton
Full Text of J. LeRoy Book Reviews
Read 13 Dec 2003 to 8 Jan 2004
Where: Seattle
When one goes to Amazon.com and looks at book reviews, there are generally about a half dozen. Sometimes a book will work its way up to fifty or a hundred or so. There are over 600 reviews of this book on Amazon. Every single review disagrees with every single other review. And every single review paints an accurate picture of the book.
Because this book is about and by Hillary Clinton.
The reviews say the book is honest, dishonest, illuminating, evasive, a white-washing and an airing of laundry. And it’s all true.
Why shouldn’t it be? Hillary is not duty-bound to deconstruct each event that happened to her while she was in the white house. She is telling the reader her side of events.
In addition, while Hillary is more-or-less expected to give a brutal soul searching in such a book, she by her own admition is not the most effusive or emotional person on the planet. It does not seem consistent with her character for her to engage in self-flagellation for acts that for whatever reason caught the public’s attention.
My favorite Amazon review was from someone who said that this was list of insignificant meetings with insignificant people. I wonder who that reviewer hangs out with.
Other reviews say that one should read this if they want to find out “what really happened”. Well, I’m not sure that’s fair either.
It is certainly clear that the 8 years of investigations that only revealed one night of oral sex was caused by partisan politics at its worst. But one doesn’t need to read this to find that out. On the other hand, Hillary does have kind things to say about Dick Gephardt who until recently was one of the poster children for partisan bickering and game playing.
So the reader must take a step back and read this book as I did. Hillary was one of our most effective first ladies. She rather unexpectedly ended up at the white house and had some adventures and some misadventures. She made some mistakes. She had some thrilling experiences. And she had the crap kicked out of her.
She had the crap kicked out of her because she was actually qualified to do what she was trying to do. Very few people understood her background. They thought she was just another person who happened to be married to the president.
Some critics of this book say it is told simplistically. Many of the same say that she shouldn’t have written it because she should be busy being a senator. Many of those say she shouldn’t a senator at all. Circular logic. Partisan bickering.
Pick your favorite senator or president and you will likely find they’ve written a book. In fact, in the last elections, our current president hadn’t written any books. So he had to quickly publish something so people wouldn’t think he wasn’t smart enough for the white house. So, it’s pretty much expected that if you are a politician that you have written a book. And god help us if we someday think our politicians have nothing to say.
Review and Blog for Ballparks Then and Now by Eric Enders
Full Text of J. LeRoy Book Reviews
Read 7 Dec to 21 Dec 2003
Where: Seattle
Earlier I had the opportunity to read Josh Leventhal's book Take Me Out to the Ballpark. Leventhal's passion for the game was evident in his well constructed book. Ballparks Then and Now had about half the content and sounded like it was being told by person who was totally bored by baseball.
Take Me Out to the Ballpark actually described the stadiums (outfield distance, peculiarities, history, fence hight, home runs hit, milestones, interesting anecdotes, etc.). Whereas, Ballparks Then and Now came across like an eighth grade report on baseball. "And then the Yankees played at the polo grounds and then they built their own stadium and then the Mets built their own stadium and then the Dodgers moved to Calfornia ..."
What was most bizarre about this book was that the text rarely lined up with the photos. The text would talk about New York baseball in 1900 and the picture is of Yankee Stadium. Later we see pictures of the first baseball games in New York ... while we read text about ... Yankee Stadium!
Do yourself a favor and get Take Me Out to the Ballpark instead.
