The full title of the book is The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President. As cumbersome and ungainly as that title is, it accurately conveys both the content and the style of the book.
Maybe it was the Clinton fatigue, but I had no interest in reading this book when it first came out in 2005. Nor did I want to read or hear any more dirt about any of the candidates during the last election cycle. So only last month did I finally pick up a copy of The Truth About Hillary on the recommendation of a friend.
I’m going to try to keep this review politically neutral and restrict my comments to the writing and not the veracity of the claims made therein. If you’re interested in my political leanings and general philosophical outlook, check out our sister site at Camp Campaign.
The Truth About Hillary was written by Edward Klein, a former NY Times Magazine editor. As a former editor himself, I would have thought he’d find someone good to edit his own book. Sadly, this book contain several typos and grammatical errors that reeked of amateur hour.
The book was roundly criticized for not bringing anything new or original to the table. With that point, I soundly disagree. There was a lot that I didn’t know about Hillary and Bill Clinton in The Truth About Hillary. Maybe if you’re a political junkie who was tuned into CNN or Fox News 8 hours a day, you would have heard all the allegations and details that were in the book, but I hadn’t.
For example, did you know that Hillary Rodham started her teen years as a “Goldwater Girl” and a staunch Conservative? Or that it was her youth pastor who turned her to the liberal side? Aside from the interesting biographical information, The Truth About Hillary contains a lot of sordid detail about Bill’s womanizing which, if the book is to believed, was even worse than we all imagined it to be.
Now that she is out of the spotlight (inasmuch as being Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world can be considered “out of the spotlight”), The Truth About Hillary makes an interesting but unspectacular read without the political baggage it carried when it first came out.
