By: E&P Staff Like The New York Times last Thursday, The Washington Post has decided to post its upcoming review of Bill Clinton's memoir, "My Life," on its Web site well in advance of publication. The review by Walter Isaacson, slated to appear this Sunday, opens, "If each era gets the leaders it deserves, then it is also true that each gets the memoirs it deserves. Not surprisingly, Bill Clinton, avatar of the 1990s and of the aging baby boom, has written one suited for the Age of Oprah."
Isaacson acidly observes that "in his rush to meet his publication deadline, Clinton seems to have sacrificed a more thoughtful historical analysis in favor of pouring every meeting, meal and travelogue into print."
Well-known from his days at Time magazine and CNN, Isaacson is presently president of the Aspen Institute and author of "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life."
Isaacson notes that Clinton's 957-page book "captures and conveys, in ways that are sometimes brilliant and at other times unintentional, the essence of his personality and presidency: fascinating, undisciplined, deeply intelligent, self-indulgent and filled with great promise alternately grasped and squandered."
The memoir, he adds, "reflects our times," in being one of those "hyper-marketed blockbusters that are rushed into print and hurled into promotional orbit. Clinton was inexplicably pushed by the normally stately House of Knopf to meet an arbitrary deadline, and guessing whether he would meet it became a public pastime. The result is as messy as certain months of his presidency. His beguiling recollection of his childhood is stapled together with a hastily-disgorged data dump on the day-by-day chronology of his presidency ...
"Despite all of this, Clinton's finished product evokes another quote from Twain: like Wagner's music, it's not as bad as it sounds. His life is too fascinating, his mind too brilliant, his desire to charm too strong to permit him to produce a boring book. The combination of analytic and emotional intelligence that made him a great politician now makes him a compelling raconteur. "
Isaacson closes by writing that "if historians are lucky, Clinton will do what he sometimes does on the golf course and take a mulligan or do-over on the second half of his book. Five or 10 years from now, when passions have cooled and some perspective is possible, he might write a more studied and reflective account of his presidency, not rushing against a deadline. That book would have the potential of being truly enlightening, rather than merely a fascinating reflection of the tenor of our times."
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