Winter Reading 2003-2004
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N AT U R A L G R O C E RY E S T. 1 9 8 2
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education class, attends every morning of
fourth grade, then tries home schooling
until she runs out of money. Like Blaze,
she defies categorization.
Ginsberg says she wrote this memoir
with Blaze’s blessing and felt compelled to
write it. “I had never found a book like
this, although I’d been searching for many
years,” she writes. This story is a gift,
then, even if you don’t have an unusual
child. After you read it, you’ll wonder
what happened and root for Blaze too.
— Holly Knight
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Too Careful
Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Simon & Schuster, 2003. Hardcover, $28.
I
f you are conflicted about Hillary
Clinton (and who isn’t?) don’t expect
to slog through her 528 pages of text
and find some resolution to your conflict. I
laid down the book even more unsure
about this woman who would/could be the
first woman president of the United States.
It is dizzying to imagine the first
woman president. Hillary Rodham Clinton
has the right resumé: Midwestern middle-
class family, strong Protestant roots,
evolving social conscience, degrees from
Wellesley and Yale Law school, a success-
ful career, marriage to a charismatic politi-
cian, and the inexorable march with him to
the top.
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This is all carefully chronicled in
Living History. That’s the fundamental
flaw of the book. It’s too careful a chroni-
cle of the brilliant presidency of Bill
Clinton and the nearly perfect preparation
of Hillary Clinton to someday succeed
him.
The Monica Lewinsky episode, which
certainly drew the eight-million-dollar
advance, comes across as a painful blem-
ish: “I never believed that I had the luxury
of climbing into bed and pulling the cov-
ers over my head,” Clinton writes. “As his
wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck. But he
was not only my husband, he was also my
president.” She wondered several times
whether they should stay together.
As we all knew she would, she stayed by
her man at this critical juncture just as she
did in his first presidential campaign when
the Gennifer Flowers story hit the national
press. It’s impossible to imagine how
Clinton could have incurred a greater polit-
ical debt to his wife. Although the topic is
never fronted in Living History, this book is
partly about pay-back time, first a seat in
the U.S. Senate and next, the presidency.
This fall Bill Clinton told a gathering of
contributors at their New York home that
the two best presidential possibilities at this
time are Wesley Clark and Hillary Clinton.
She has disclaimed ambitions for 2004, but
2008 is the magic year.
So it is entirely appropriate that she put
her story out there now in the fashion that
male candidates nearly always do. But if
you want to know more about her, don’t
bother with the book. Read the reviews.
The best is Gary Wills’ apt conclusion in
the New York Review of Books, (08/14/03),
which reflects my own conflict:
Much of the earthquake response to the
career of Hillary Rodham Clinton is sim-
ply one sign of a far wider seismic distur-
bance rumbling through the whole of our
society. That is why her book is a signifi-
cant event — significant more for the
polar responses to it than for any fresh
thinking in it.
Other sources include Maureen Dowd,
The New York Times Book Review
(06/29/03) and Joyce Purnick in “Metro
Matters,” The New York Times (06/19/03).
Better than either of these is Elizabeth
Kolbert’s long New Yorker (11/13/93)
piece. — Anita Johnson
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