My Life
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Avg: 4.0 (18 ratings)
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Audiobook Download Information
- Edition:
- Abridged (Random House Audio)
- Length:
- 6 hours, 8 minutes
- File Size:
- 168 MB (6 files)
- Published:
- June 2004
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Review by Sarah Weinman, eMusic
To Bill Clinton's credit, My Life does not shy away from frank discussion of the tumultuous events that marked his eight years in the White House — even if it does come with the expected slant of a first-person narrative. But in its paper format the book weighed in at well over 1,000 pages, and long before he gets around to hot topics like Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, Kenneth Starr and impeachment, Clinton details his formative years in Arkansas: the troubled childhood he overcame by escaping to Georgetown, then Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship; meeting future wife Hillary and rising up the local political ladder to the governorship of his home state. He documents past events with the charisma and vigor that informed his presidential speeches, lending a sense of appealing immediacy. The audiobook version actually lends a new dimension to the text: As My Life moves Clinton into Washington's inner sanctum, his vocal mannerisms become more fervent, filled with pain and fury that still feels raw years after impeachment proceedings.
Seven years after he completed his two-term Presidency of the United States, Bill Clinton remains a controversial figure. So while there is no one better suited to narrating his life and place in American history than Clinton himself, this is only one side of a complex story years away from full rendering.
Quotes from the Critics
"William Jefferson Clinton's MY LIFE is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography--no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's--or perhaps the world's--No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write--as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not....But he's lonely, and in the quality of his loneliness lies much of his appeal. And he does have serious appeal. Nothing in this book becomes Clinton so much as his gentle, sympathetic treatment of his alcoholic, sometimes abusive stepfather, Roger Clinton, whose name he took and whom he calls Daddy...I happen to like long, smart, dense narratives and read MY LIFE straight through, happily. I may not know Bill Clinton any better than I did when I started, but I know recent history better, which surely can't hurt." - New York Times
"It's almost voluptuous to read Clinton when he's recounting or analyzing a political race or a legislative battle, whether it's his own or somebody else's.....Passages like these, and there are plenty of them, are enriched by a characteristic mixture of shrewdness, and a nuanced appreciation of context. The problem is that the book is not a sculpture garden. It's a quarry. It's a strip mine. There's gold in that thar hill, but it's veined among layers of rocky sediment, and you have to bring your own pickaxe." - New Yorker
"Clinton has many tales to tell, particularly a rich, sometimes moving account of his years before the public life, fit for future analytical historians and biographers. Clinton, true to form, is enchanting and infuriating, fascinating and perplexing, with some lies and evasions, as well as some truth and revelations; and always accommodating, eager to please. The personal and the political are intertwined. Vintage Clinton." - Nation
"For the first couple hundred pages in his memoir...Clinton writes with grace and fluidity....He is a supremely unscripted man. And he is also a born storyteller, whose natural story, greatest story, and perhaps only truly interesting story is himself...." - New Republic
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