Who cares about the book? Read the review.

Noemie Emery has read and reviewed Bill Clinton : Mastering the Presidency, by Nigel Hamilton. Having read the review, I say, “The heck with the book.  The review is so wonderfully written, you can’t do better.”  After discussing Hamilton’s fevered Kennedy biography, one so malevolent in its approach to old Joe that the family withdrew its support for the originally planned additional volumes, Hamilton turned his emotional energies to Bill Clinton.  Here is what Noemie has to say, with my favorite part highlighted:

In the Kennedy book, Inga Arvad [Kennedy’s first love] and Joe Kennedy were not central figures, and did not completely unbalance the story. In this book, one’s luck does not hold. In this one, the crush is Bill Clinton himself, and the bêtes noires are his enemies–the racists, bigots, primates, low-lives, KKK rejects, and cross and/or heretic burners–who constitute the modern conservative movement and who, largely for reasons of sexual jealousy, focused their wrath on poor Bill.

The result is neither a case nor a narrative, but rather an adjective dump, in which truckloads of words–all meaning the same thing, and sometimes the same words, used over and over–are trundled over to the appropriate objects and unloaded on them, in a torrent of excess and overkill. If your politics are of the MoveOn.org genre, and your taste in literature is an Al Gore tirade mixed with the gushings of Barbara Cartland, then this is a book you will cherish. If not, you have been warned.