The New York Times on Sunday criticized former US president Bill Clinton's upcoming memoirs as too much like their author, an unfocused policy wonk.
But My Life remains the most highly anticipated memoir to be released since that last summer of Clinton's wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Ahead of its release today, My Life has rocketed to the top of the bestseller list at amazon.com on the promise of sex, war, humiliation and triumph, starting with Clinton's hard-scrabble childhood in Arkansas, which was marked by abuse, to his eight years as leader of the world's only remaining superpower, which was notable for a sex scandal that nearly cost Clinton the presidency to his failed efforts to ink an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and the first rumblings of the war on terrorism.
Dan Rather, a television journalist granted the first interview with Clinton, compared the book to the memoirs of former president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant, which have been praised for their vividness and insightfulness. But the Times' review of Clinton's book was less than complimentary.
"The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull -- the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history", the newspaper wrote, saying it adds little that the public didn't already now about the man who was president from 1993 to 2001.
Newsweek concurred -- to a point.
"Every facet of Clinton's complex, nuanced and sometimes maddening personality is on display," it said. "He is by turns introspective and wilfully obtuse, expansive and curt. One moment, he forces the reader on a joyless march through an arid policy debate. The next, he offers up a raw, confessional moment that almost makes the book seem worth the US$35 price of admission."
My Life, for which Clinton reportedly received a US$10 million advance, does contain some revelations about his youth and post-sex scandal relations with his wife, but the Times said is glosses over some major events, including his dispatching of an aircraft carrier to the Taiwan Strait to deter China from conducting missile tests before a Taiwan election and his administration's collossal failure to implement health-care reform at the beginning of his presidency.
Clinton, whose father died shortly after his son's birth, acknowledges that he repeatedly saw his alcoholic stepfather beat his mother and abuse his stepbrother, Roger, and once saw him fire a gun at his mother's head.
He said he learned to hide his family's abuse, living what he called "parallel lives," outgoing and optimistic on the outside and insecure and torn by weakness on the inside.
He implied that these "old demons" prompted his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which nearly cost him the presidency and his marriage, and caused him to lie about it for months to the public and his family.
Clinton said when he confessed the affair to his wife, she looked as if she had been punched in the stomach. He said it was even worse for him to confess to his daughter, Chelsea, believing that his affair had cost him her love and respect.
He said he slept on a couch in the White House for months after the confession, but he and his wife underwent a year of counselling to save their marriage, which he said Hillary Clinton had been reluctant to engage in in the first place, having hesitated to accept his marriage proposal.
RSS