My life

'My Life' is a long and detailed autobiography of William Jefferson Clinton, the forty-second president of the United States of America. Though this book is very long, approximately one thousand pages, it was entertaining enough to read the whole thing. It is obvious that he kept a detailed diary

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his whole life.

Pres. Clinton's book is not the normal biography. It is written in chronological order starting with his boyhood. Though as you read it you will find yourself jumping all over time. He does this whenever he feels he has to defend his actions. And I felt the whole book is about trying to defend his legacy and set the record straight. The book seems very self-serving and he seems more concerned about what we think of him, instead of just writing what transpired.

Though I did find his book very easy to read. I did feel as if he I was sitting on a covered front porch with a class of ice tea and listening as Pres. Clinton spins an interesting tale. I had no problem reading the entire book and did find it enjoyable despite his agenda. He does share some of his shortcomings and how he overcame them. This is also a story of a boy making good in America. He comes from rural state and used every opportunity America offers each and every one of us. And that message is worth sharing.

Do not pick up this book looking for dark details of his life. You will not find it. But I did learn much about how he saw himself and his view on affairs that affected or touched his life. I do recommend reading this book.

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Political memoirs are notorious for being ponderous exercises in self-gratification. It's hard to find a book that isn't like this - Bill's book is guilty of it - but far less than many others have been.

On the contrary - it is a piercing and interesting book about the nature of the presidency. It

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has become more interesting with the benefit of hindsight. Having a friendly debate with Newt Gingrich? Trying to pass health care reform? Preventing the stagnation of the economy? All of these issues are too relevant to the modern discourse. The political wranglings then have only become worse now, and many can rightfully yearn for the peaceful days of the 1990s.

I am impressed by his strong memory, attention to detail, his descriptions of events of every nature, his dealings with all characters. Any president has to do some superhuman effort in order to even get elected.

Of course, no president is flawless. He does gloss over some of his most unsavory affairs. But if you can survive these shortcomings, as well as the vast length of the book, you can find a truly interesting portrait of a past era.

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Good read from a sorely missed and literate president.

An interesting, and surprisingly straightforward, memoir.

The biography of William Jefferson Clinton our 42nd President of the United States is a very fact full book. If you ever wanted to know anything about Bill Clinton it is probably chronicled somewhere in this book. Although interesting and insight gaining you must wade through, sometimes, too much

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information. It doesn't always flow and you can get bogged down by the day to day flow of information. This is truly a book that is all encompassing of his life from childhood through manhood, schooling, parental shaping, family, dating, marriage, values, politics, mistakes, love, adultery, fatherhood and so much more. A hard read in my opinion but, insightful.

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Well that was an interesting read...
I will never claim to be a fan of Bill Clinton and his politics but I do have to say that this biography was well written and kept me reading. The stories related to the international affairs alone were worth reading this book. There are many aspects of the

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presidency (of either party) that the public simply does not see or do not pay close attention too...Clinton lays many of these things out in fascinating stories.
There are aspects of the political policy (in my opinion) that he exaggerated his support.
The book kept me entertained and I came back time and again to get this HUGE book read.

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I finally got around to reading Bill Clinton's memoir MY LIFE. As you might expect it was too long, too wordy and too detailed. Since he wrote it it makes him look good, much of which isn't warranted. But there are enough interesting things to make it worth reading. But a caveat, one must read

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BECAUSE HE CAN by Dick Morris as a companion to Clinton's memoirs. Morris tells it like it was. When Clinton fails by omitting significant facts and details, Morris fills in. Morris calls him on many things. That is why I say you need to read them together. Morris' book is also an interesting read and necessary to keep the record honest.

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The name Bill Clinton evokes several reactions among people, each with its own emotional subtext: economic prosperity, partisan conflict, sexual misconduct, and international peacemaking. In a long history of American presidential memoirs, Clinton adds his to the list in this book. It is lengthy,

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thoughtful, and carefully crafted. He attempts to provide insight into himself and his leadership while advocating for the policies his administration enacted during his presidency.

I was a Republican teenager from a Republican home during the Clinton years. This book evoked memories of loyal opposition. However, Clinton’s successes – combined with W’s relative failures and Obama’s relative successes – have moved me to consistently vote as a Democrat today. Clinton’s memories in this account allowed me to reimagine the history around me. His clear voice provides persuasive explanations for his policies.

The first half of this book is devoted to his life before the presidency. To me, this formed the most interesting part – how exactly he overcame many challenges to rise to the height of political power. Much of the second half (his eight-year presidency) was embroiled with tensions with Republicans and thus was not as enjoyable. However, his passionate advocacy for international peacemaking came through clearly, from Northern Ireland and Africa to North Korea and Israel/Palestine. Providing this rationale for foreign policies is perhaps the most valuable from a historical perspective, specifically how the personalities of the involved characters shaped the failure to find lasting Middle East peace.

Of course, this book was written well before the “Me Too” movement, and the power dynamics of sexual relationships do not make Clinton look good. He acknowledges missteps, both with Monica Lewinsky and with vaguely described earlier mistakes, but he spares readers gaudy details. He talks about personal growth that impeachment and marital/family rifts evoked. He never seems to fully grasp that a leader’s private life always comes out in the public portrait. I took this overarching lesson from events in the 1990s and hold onto it still.

Overall, this memoir is certainly needed to fill out the historical record. Some might criticize him for being too lengthy and thought-out, but isn’t this the job of a president, to care for her/his own country? Frankly, Clinton’s vision for the world is beautiful and good. If one is willing to think through the policy details with him, this book can be beneficial for dreaming the world’s “tomorrow.” Like the Clinton presidency itself, shortcomings in this portrayal’s self-awareness remain, but this frankly can be said for any of us.

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I'm glad I have read this, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had not been so long-winded.

This 'thank you' to everybody who ever did anything for President Clinton is The Ultimate Primer on how to succeed in politics. Yeah, it's long. Yeah, it's probably way too detailed for most readers. But it's a gold-mine for political junkies interested in 'the process.'

This is very long but it gives the reader a great deal of insight into a great American President. If you are a Clinton fan, you definitely should read this.

This is an interesting review of his life and his personal struggles. I particularly like the personal stories of his political battles while he was President and the inside stories during that time. It is an eye opener of how and why things happen the way they do in Washington, D.C.

Yayyy! I finally finished this book! It's huge and full of detail. It's
good but in some places (the excruciating detail of the various peace talks
for example) I found my eyes crossing and had to lay it down for a while.

I have to say that one of three things must be true of Bill Clinton. Either
a) he

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kept copious journals from about the age of 2 year onward, b) he has a
photographic memory, or c) he was making this up as he went along. He
included the most minute details of his formative years, every campaign he
ever ran, nearly every hand he ever shook. But for all that, he left out
details of certain episodes we all know took place in the Oval Office with a
certain intern. Actually, he did refer to that and even devoted about
half a chapter to it, but even with all his words, he didn't really tell us
anything we didn't already know in lurid detail from the Starr report that
went to Congress and got posted on the Internet. The insights he did give
into the whys and wherefores of the Starr investigation into the most
private details of his (and many others as well) life were interesting.

I enjoyed this book because it gave me another point of view for a lot of
things and explained the odd relationship between Clinton and Newt
Gingrinch, Clinton's love for his family and his home state of Arkansas, a
little behind the scenes explanations for some of the mistakes Gore made in
the 2000 campaign and a myriad of other things. If you enjoy biographies
and politics, you'll enjoy this book. Clinton has a very friendly writing
style and tells the stories of his life well. I do think, though, that he
would have benefited from some editing. There were a lot of details that
seemed to drag on and on forever. So it is for that reason that I will give
the book a 4, though it should have been a 5 with better editing.

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A very slow read... not my kind of book. It could have been done with more passion and love.

Close to 1000 pages of Bill Clinton explaining to the American people how great he is and what a great presidency he had. I thought it focused too much on his early years. Die-hard Clintonistas might like it. Politics buffs should read the second half to get an insider's acocunt on how Washington,

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in its most vitriolic form, works. For anyone else, this is a good book to skim and just read the interesting bits.

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A long, 900 pages long, but full of information and good stories. If you are a Clinton fan, read it.

A very long read, but worth it for the extraordinary insight. Since I'm such a detail oriented individual, I could understand the long and sometimes tedious nature of the book, but I could also understand some peoples frustrations with me at times. Took me a while to complete, and I also have the

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audio book (read by Clinton himself) to help me "re-read" some particular points. I also had the fortune of meeting Bill Clinton in Manhattan for a signing during the initail release of the book. The chance to meet him, shake his hand, and comment on the writing was worth the 4 hour wait.

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Who's the little boy who wrote this book? Oh...the former president of the USA.
Curiosity.

I started reading this and got up until he got a scholarship to college. I want to continue reading it but I'm really not in the mood for a biography right now.

I really enjoyed this autobiography. I learned a lot about Bill Clinton's presidency and all the things that were going on in the world during those eight years. My favorite parts of the book were the stories of his growing up in Arkansas and the things he did while in school. The book weighs a

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ton, and it is 957 pages long, but I did not get tired of it at all.

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Really comprehensive book. About a billion pages long.

-Grew in a partly quite unstable family environment.
-Vietnam story important to him. Probably even more so because of criticism faced later as a draft dodger.
-the nasty tone of Newt Gingrichs’s Republican party is striking, but maybe above all its certainty. A lengthy quote from Clinton:

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“Even though I was intrigued by Gingrich and impressed by his political skills, I didn’t think much of his claim that his politics represented America’s best values. I had been raised not to look down on anyone and not to blame others for my own problems or shortcomings. That’s exactly what the “New Right” message did. But it had enormous political appeal because it offered both psychological certainty and escape from responsibility: “they” were always right, “we” were always wrong; “we” were responsible for all the problems, even though “they” had controlled the presidency for all but six of the last twenty-six years. All of us are vulnerable to arguments that let us off the hook, and in the 1994 election, in an America where hardworking middle-class families felt economic anxiety and were upset by the pervasiveness of crime, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was an audience for the Gingrich message, especially when we didn’t offer a competing one.
Gingrich and the Republican right had brought us back to the 1960s again; Newt said that America had been a great country until the sixties, when the Democrats took over and replaced absolute notions of right and wrong with more relativistic values. He pledged to take us back to the morality of the 1950s, in order to “renew American civilization.”
Of course there were political and personal excesses in the 1960s, but the decade and
the movements it spawned also produced advances in civil rights, women’s rights, a clean
environment, workplace safety, and opportunities for the poor. The Democrats believed
in and worked for those things. So did a lot of traditional Republicans, including many of
the governors I’d served with in the late 1970s and 1980s. In focusing only on the
excesses of the 1960s, the New Right reminded me a lot of the carping that white
southerners did against Reconstruction for a century after the Civil War. When I was
growing up, we were still being taught how mean the Northern forces were to us during
Reconstruction, and how noble the South was, even in defeat. There was something to it,
but the loudest complaints always overlooked the good done by Lincoln and the national
Republicans in ending slavery and preserving the Union. On the big issues, slavery and
the Union, the South was wrong.
Now it was happening again, as the right wing used the excesses of the sixties to
obscure the good done in civil rights and other areas.”
This many seem to have retained.
-Clinton offers Republican Senator Alan Simpson’s view of the Whitewater affair and the press generally: “I was genuinely confused by the mainstream press coverage of Whitewater; it seemed inconsistent with the more careful and balanced approach the press had taken on other issues, at least since the Republicans won the Congress in 1994. One day, after one of our budget meetings in October, I asked Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming to stay a moment to talk. Simpson was a conservative Republican, but we had a pretty good relationship because of the friendship we had in common with his governor, Mike Sullivan. I asked Alan if he thought Hillary and I had done anything wrong in Whitewater. “Of course not,” he said. “That’s not what this is about. This is about making the public think you did something wrong. Anybody who looked at the evidence would see that you did'nt.” Simpson laughed at how willing the “elitist” press was to swallow anything negative about small, rural places like Wyoming or Arkansas and made an interesting observation: “You know, before you were elected, we Republicans believed the press was liberal. Now we have a more sophisticated view. They are liberal in a way. Most of them voted for you, but they think more like your right-wing critics do, and that’s much more important.” When I asked him to explain, he said, “Democrats like you and Sullivan get into government to help people. The right-wing extremists don’t think government can do much to improve on human nature, but they do like power. So does the press. And since you’re President, they both get power the same way, by hurting you.” I appreciated Simpson’s candor and I thought about what he said for months. For a long time, whenever I was angry about the Whitewater press coverage I would tell people about Simpson’s analysis. When I finally just accepted his insight as accurate, it was liberating, and it cleared my head for the fight.”
-It should not be forgotten how scandalous the stealing of the Bush-Gore election was, where the conservative majority in the Supreme Court decided not to recount the votes.

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Bill Clinton's life and presidency in his own words. A passionate telling of his life. A truly dynamic individual.

Despite being heavily edited from what is a very substantial book, the abridged audio version of My Life manages to cover the major features of Bill Clinton's life, in a time span of 6.5 hrs of tape. What's more, it is read by the author, Pres. Clinton himself. The latter fact is but one of the

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features that makes this audio book unprecedented. The other is the level of detail that characterizes this revealing and deeply personal memoir.

The audio book begins with his childhood in Arkansas; covers his years of schooling and difficult home life; his education at George Wasington University and then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; his struggles over the military service issue; his years in law school and his early relationship with Hillary; his move back to Arkansas and marriage; his entry into politics, culminating in the governoship; his successful run for national office; and the eight years of his presidency.

Mr. Clinton is passionate on the political issues (including the heavily- financed and well- coordinated attempt by the Republicans to force him from office), and is at times unsparing in his self-criticism when it comes to the personal failings that armed his bitter political enemies. Love him or not, this is one of the most extraordinary politicians in US history, a powerful personality of prodigious talents. Listening to the story being read by the man who wrote it and lived it is an opportunity not to be missed by anyone interested in Bill Clinton and the times he helped to shape.

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