Love & War

March 3, 2014
Matalin and Carville (All's Fair) continue the saga of their politically-bipartisan marriage and career highlights from the beginning of the Clinton administration to current issues and events. Matalin reflects honestly on losing the 1993 election, feeling like a "poster child for failure and disgrace," wanting to feel happy for Carville while she "simultaneously hated every inch of his skinny Cajun being." This situation is reversed in 2000 when Matalin takes a job working for Dick Cheney, whom she calls "a man of impeccable integrity" while Carville suffers bitter disappointment. Matalin provides a first-hand account of being in the White House on 9/11, working in an underground bunker with the Vice President, and both offer alternate takes on the Iraq War that toe their respective party lines. Carville opens up about his ADHD and shares some helpful advice for anyone looking to charm Barbara Bush. On the topic of Matalin's menagerie of pets, he compares them to her politics: "I generally dislike them, so I tend to ignore them." The couple finds common ground in their love of New Orleans, where they relocated in 2008âCarville praises LSU football while Matalin notes the community spirit that rallied residents after Hurricane Katrina. The book works best when Matalin and Carville alternate riffs on the same topics, when they stray from that format; it is a bit of a jumble.

December 15, 2013
A strangely compelling dueling memoir by the improbably matched political couple. Chicago-native Republican strategist Matalin (Letters to My Daughters, 2004) and New Orleans-born Bill Clinton campaign manager Carville (co-author: It's the Middle Class, Stupid!, 2012) alternate relentless takes on the events of the last 20 years--both public news stories, such as the 2000 presidential election recount that deeply shook their marriage, and private milestones like moving with their two then-tween-age daughters to New Orleans from Washington, D.C., in 2008. Matalin garners the lion's share of space, as she discourses on events and personalities in more leisurely, mannered detail, especially the two years she worked as assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney (dispensing the standard talking points for the media meant, "it was up to you to make processed canned food taste garden fresh"). In his pithy style, Carville gets in some good digs of his own. For example, he recounts his simmering resentment at his wife for taking that same VP job in the first place, suppressing an uncivil urge to wish her "good luck on cutting taxes for rich people on her way out the door." Both are funny in their fashions and respectful of and loving toward the other--rather incredibly, considering their vast ideological divides. In one illuminating tale, Carville tells of the post-9/11 Christmas holiday the family had to spend near the Cheneys in Wyoming, which he made the best of despite the fact that "we were surrounded by Republicans." In spite of Matalin's gushing praise of "Poppy" Bush, Lee Atwater, Rush Limbaugh and others, and despite Carville's merciless jabs at their "boneheaded positions," the couple's revelatory account of Carville's late-life diagnosis of ADHD and their work to rebuild their hometown prove miraculously touching. A solid memoir of political lives from both sides of the spectrum.

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August 1, 2013

Perhaps the only practitioners of true bipartisanship in the country, Carville and Matalin married after the 1992 presidential campaign, during which he strategized for Bill Clinton and she for George H.W. Bush. In their first joint book since 1994's eye-opening best seller All's Fair, they speak in alternate voices, addressing both politics and the personal as they move from raising a family in high-pressure Washington, DC, to their decision to move to post-Katrina New Orleans and help rebuilt it.

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