What Happened

May 1, 2017

This just in: a new book from Clinton that features essays about her life, all the way up to the 2016 presidential campaign. The pieces are inspired by quotations she has collected over the years. As she says, "These are the words I live by. These quotes have helped me celebrate the good times, laugh at the absurd times, persevere during the hard times, and deepen my appreciation of all life has to offer. I hope by sharing these words and my thoughts about them, the essays will be meaningful for readers."

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 2, 2017
In the audio edition of her 2016 presidential campaign retrospective, Clinton sounds like Clinton: a strong, tough, smart, experienced woman. She’s a little wobbly-voiced in the introduction, deeply concerned that people won’t want to hear what happened, “especially from me,” she states. But she quickly finds her clear, collected tone and rhythm, sounding slightly more relaxed and conversional than she usually is in speeches and interviews. She is emotionally composed even when describing her fury at Trump, at FBI director James Comey, at Senator Bernie Sanders, at the media. At one point in the book, she even says, “I wear my composure like a suit of armor—for better or for worse.” Thus the drama is not so much in her reading as in the descriptions of her intellectual and emotional responses to events such as when Comey reopened the investigation into her email days before the election, the instant she learned she lost the election, or Trump’s inauguration. The one jarring aspect of the audio is her long pronunciation of the indefinite article a, constantly interrupting the flow of her normal speech. It’s Clinton’s most personal book yet; hearing it read in her own voice further reminds listeners of the person behind the politician. A Simon & Schuster hardcover.

Gracious, sometimes-wonkish post-mortem of the last presidential election by its surprise loser, who still can't quite believe...well, what happened."I ran for President because I thought I'd be good at the job," writes Clinton (Hard Choices, 2014, etc.), modestly. She adds, a touch less demurely, "I thought that of all the people who might run, I had the most relevant experience, meaningful accomplishments, and ambitious but achievable proposals, as well as the temperament to get things done in Washington." Against her was arrayed a field of Republican candidates that included the one no one took seriously--but also, as the author notes in a reckoning that is remarkably measured, a whole cultural and political field of opponents, including Russian hackers and a grudge-bearing Vladimir Putin, the crew of WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders and his devout followers, misogyny, and a few missteps that, refreshingly, Clinton's not shy about owning up to. (One takeaway: don't campaign with pneumonia. Take a day off.) Of the many enemies, writes the author, misogyny was likely the most intractable, even given James Comey, the screams about emails, voter suppression, and Donald Trump's hammering away about "lying Hillary," to say nothing about looming behind her creepily in debate. Mostly, Clinton campaigned against anger, and she could never quite get a handle on how to reckon with it. Pundits have since insisted that Clinton should have spoken more from the heart and been less managed, which isn't really how politics is done--well, until Trump came along and opened the door to a post-truth America. Of all the upshots, that truth business seems to be what bothers Clinton most, but mostly she's understandably amazed, as are so many, to have gone to bed in one America and awoken in another: "I picture future historians scratching their heads, trying to understand what happened. I'm still scratching mine, too." A touch too reserved and polite, given the circumstances, and in need of supplementing by hard-edged books like Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes' Shattered. Still, a useful book to read--and, for many, to mourn over.

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