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Product Description
A fascinating portrait of the most intriguing lady in America - The First Lady - by the bestselling author who has revealed more about her than any other.
In a real sense, Hillary's Choice is a love story - one whose rocky moments, rather than remaining private, have been publicized beyond any imagining.
What is the real story of the marriage of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton? Gail Sheehy began to discover it seven years ago, when she wrote the first revealing piece about Hillary. Since then, she has followed and recorded this relationship as only she can.
Hillary's Choice takes the Clintons from the moment their eyes met in law school through the humiliation of the Lewinsky affair and the drama of the impeachment battle to reveal the power shifts, the genuine passion, and the ultimate price Hillary has paid for her love and her ambition.
Combined with in-depth reporting, Gail Sheehy has brought an acute understanding to the private dynamic of a very public an political partnership.
Amazon.com Review
Vanity Fair writer Gail Sheehy's engrossing biography of Hillary Clinton is a refreshing departure from the political hit jobs that have appeared elsewhere in print. That's not to say Hillary's Choice is a pro-Clinton book--Hillary herself would probably bristle at reading it, and her husband ("The story of the Clinton presidency has always been the story of the Clinton marriage," writes Sheehy) comes off as a bright but demented cad. Yet Hillary's Choice is broadly sympathetic and often nonjudgmental at crucial moments. Sheehy writes very little about public policy, but includes plenty of pop psychologizing. She suggests that the president is a sex addict afflicted by what "a highly qualified mental health professional who works too close to the White House to be identified" calls "dissociative identities"--what used to be known as "multiple personalities ... a sum of various identities that have been split off at some time in the past." And the president gets away with so much in his personal life because Hillary has become his unwitting enabler: "Every addict or alcoholic needs one. The enabler is usually an intimate of the addicted person who allows him to persist in self-destructive behavior by making excuses or helping him avoid the consequences of his actions."
That describes Sheehy's Hillary perfectly: a woman apparently ignorant of her husband's several flings in the White House before Monica Lewinsky came along, and then willfully deceived by the president's lies until just hours before his momentous grand-jury testimony. Theirs is a mother-son relationship in which true love must negotiate its way through astonishingly difficult periods. That's not a formula for how marriage ought to work, but it has nevertheless helped this ultimate power couple achieve enormous success. Hillary's Choice is full of on-the-record and background interviews, all assembled in an absorbing narrative. Writes Sheehy: "The saga of Bill and Hillary, with its echoes of Eleanor and Franklin, or Tracy and Hepburn with undertones of Bonnie and Clyde, is animated by melodrama, high passion, narrow escapes, and knock-down-drag-outs." And it comes alive in this biography of the most enigmatic woman of our time. --John J. Miller
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