What Book Reviewers Are Saying About Hillary Clinton's 'What Happened?'
"What Happened," Hillary Clinton's 2016 election post-mortem, is in stores today. You probably won't have any trouble finding a copy of it for yourself, and you almost certainly won't be able to avoid random people's opinions on it, good or bad. Some select book reviewers got advance copies, so we've rounded up opinions from people who're paid to do this kind of thing. Spare yourself the tweet threads and Amazon reviews.
What Kind Of Book Is It Really?
"What Happened" is not one book, but many. It is a candid and blackly funny account of her mood in the direct aftermath of losing to Donald J. Trump. It is a post-mortem, in which she is both coroner and corpse. It is a feminist manifesto. It is a score-settling jubilee. It is a rant against James B. Comey, Bernie Sanders, the media, James B. Comey, Vladimir Putin and James B. Comey. It is a primer on Russian spying. It is a thumping of Trump. ("I sometimes wonder: If you add together his time spent on golf, Twitter and cable news," she writes, "what's left?")
[Jennifer Senior, The New York Times]
After the election, you may have been cornered by a relative or stranger or friend, and forced to listen to a detailed political manifesto, a rant at the universe, happy or sad. "What Happened" is that experience — Hillary cornering you in a coffee shop, replaying the game tape, and explaining why she was right. "I can't help but think about how different my first hundred days would have been" as opposed to President Trump's, she writes at one point, which is useful to no one.
[Joanna Weiss, Boston Globe]
More than anything, What Happened reads like a compendium of things that Clinton wanted to get off her chest: She was robbed on Election Day, the electorate is comfortable with sexism, she did plenty of things right — and she's keeping track of who did her wrong.
[Jonathan Allen, POLITICO]
Ultimately, the book might be a historical artifact most of all — the chronicling of what, exactly, it was like to run for president as the first woman major-party candidate (and, yes, a Clinton as well). Plenty may disagree with Clinton's opinions on what went wrong for her, but her story will still be an important part of that history when America looks back on the melee that was the 2016 election.
[Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR]
What's The Book's Style Like?
There are parts of this book — like the opener, for example, which is set at Trump's inauguration — that soar. Other chapters are not quite so successful. There's one that's basically a long list of everyone who worked on her campaign (the kind of stuff that should've been relegated to the acknowledgements). Sometimes her inner policy wonk gets a bit carried away. And other times her simmering anger comes boiling to the top and she'll make a cutting remark about the President, effectively undercutting whatever point she's making.
[Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly]
The book is also sometimes corny, with quotes from "Hamilton" and details about the hot sauce she carries everywhere (Ninja Squirrel Siracha), suggesting that the Clinton who told young voters to "Pokemon-go-to-the-polls" really meant it. The aphorism "What does not kill us makes us stronger" is credited to both Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson. It is, perhaps, the only political memoir that takes time to thank Beyoncé for her support.
[David Weigel, The Washington Post]
How Does It Handles The Email Scandal, Sanders, Etcetera?
Are there moments when "What Happened" is wearying, canned and disingenuous, spinning events like a top? Yes. Does it offer any new hypotheses about what doomed Clinton's campaign? No. It merely synthesizes old ones; Clinton's diagnostics are the least interesting part of the book. Is there a full chapter devoted to her email, clearly intended to make her own closing arguments in this case? Yes. She can't shake her inner litigator.
[Jennifer Senior, The New York Times]
She paints Sanders as a quixotic candidate who damaged her but had no hope of becoming president himself. She says he promised to run an issues-based campaign, but "as time went on, Bernie routinely portrayed me as a corrupt corporatist who couldn't be trusted." And she plainly opposes the idea, favored by some liberals, that the Democratic Party needs to move further left to be competitive.
[Jonathan Allen, POLITICO]
Her flip-flop on the Trans-Pacific Partnership never comes up. The Loretta Lynch incident gets barely a paragraph, and it's hard not to wonder about what's she's leaving out: What did Clinton say (or scream) when she found out her husband had met with the attorney general on an airport tarmac?
[Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR]
"The conclusion I reach from this," Clinton writes, "is that Democrats should redouble our efforts to develop bold, creative ideas that offer broad-based benefits for the whole country." The examples she gives are the proposals for a universal basic income and a fossil-fuel tax that would redistribute money from polluters to ordinary Americans. More than the standard playbook of Democratic policy proposals Clinton campaigned on, they might have energized a wider population of voters who wanted something to vote for and not just against.
[Russell Berman, The Atlantic]
How Does The Book Approach Being A Woman In Politics?
If Trump's combative inauguration speech was "a howl from the white nationalist gut," as Clinton puts it, her book is a howl from the gut of Hermione Granger — the embattled cry of the hyper-competent woman who desperately wishes the world were a meritocracy.
[Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR]
No longer a candidate or a potential candidate, Clinton writes that she is "letting my guard down." And indeed she does. The first woman presidential nominee of a major party writes extensively about the role that sexism played in the campaign in her defeat, as well as how it continues to shape the lives and perceptions of women in public life and in the workplace.
[Russell Berman, The Atlantic]
Think what Fox News or Breitbart.com, or Trump himself, will do with this admission, from a day when she was in the audience enjoying her granddaughter's ballet recital: "I felt a twinge of something I couldn't quite place. Then I realized what it was: relief. I had been ready to completely devote the next four or eight years to serving my country. But that would come with a cost. I would have missed a lot of dance recitals…" You can almost hear the gears readying to blast out something like: Grandma Clinton Relieved Not to be President. And when they do, it will be a warning shot for other women in politics against being too human — or humanized.
[Allison Adato, People Magazine]
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first female presidential nominee of a major party — defeated by a man who even Republicans called a sexist — is, as she points out in the book, the frequent answer to Gallup's question of who is "most admired woman in America." Nonetheless, she was unable to break the presidential glass ceiling, and her defeat has been genuinely traumatizing for millions of women. Locked out of the White House, she offers solidarity with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other women who are called shrill, or unlikeable, because they want to climb the same ladder as men. "I wish so badly we were a country where a candidate who said, 'My story is the story of a life shaped by and devoted to the movement for women's liberation' would be cheered, not jeered," she writes. "But that's not who we are."
[David Weigel, The Washington Post]
How Personally Revealing Is It?
The best, most poignant parts of "What Happened" reveal the Hillary Clinton that her inner circle has assured us was lurking beneath the surface all along: A woman who's arch but sensitive. She writes that she's astonished whenever someone else is astonished to discover she's human. "For the record," she writes, "it hurts to be torn apart."
[Jennifer Senior, The New York Times]
The world might enjoy a fully unguarded look at Clinton, freed from her political constraints, but we only get glimpses here. In a few passages about her personal life, she writes about her desire for privacy ("You've read my e-mails, for heaven's sake. What more could you need?") and knocks the widespread assumption that she and Bill "must have an arrangement." ("We do," she quips. "It's called a marriage.")
[Joanna Weiss, Boston Globe]
The Hillary Clinton of this bitter memoir resembles the shrunken, beaten Richard Nixon who told David Frost that he gave his enemies a sword and "they twisted it with relish." Again and again she blames herself for losing, apologizing for her "dumb" email management, for giving paid speeches to banks, for saying she'd put coal miners "out of business." She veers between regret and righteous anger, sometimes in the same paragraph.
[David Weigel, The Washington Post]
The greatest unintended consequence of this memoir is that it may make its author, at last, widely relatable[…] as she recounts here, on the 2016 day in New Hampshire when her eyes glistened as she admitted how tough campaigning can be, pundits noted that her near-tear had humanized her. She writes that she was "a little beleaguered at the reminder that, yet again, I — a human — required 'humanizing.' " (I find those on-line "I am not a robot" Captcha check-boxes annoying; Clinton must see them as a constant affront.)
[Allison Adato, People Magazine]
TL;DR
Love it or loathe it, chafe at it or cheer it; you will now see, for the first time, what it looks like when Clinton doesn't spend all of her energy suppressing her irritation.
[Jennifer Senior, The New York Times]
