What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Hardcover, 2017

Status

Available

Tags

First Ladies

Genres

Publication

Simon & Schuster (2017), Edition: First Edition, 512 pages

Description

Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. Free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. She describes what it was like to run against Donald Trump, the mistakes she made, how she has coped with a shocking and devastating loss, and how she found the strength to pick herself back up afterward. With humor and candor, she tells readers what it took to get back on her feet -- the rituals, relationships, and reading that got her through, and what the experience has taught her about life. She speaks about the challenges of being a strong woman in the public eye, the criticism over her voice, age, and appearance, and the double standard confronting women in politics. She lays out how the 2016 election was marked by an unprecedented assault on our democracy by a foreign adversary. By analyzing the evidence and connecting the dots, Hillary shows just how dangerous the forces are that shaped the outcome, and why Americans need to understand them to protect our values and our democracy in the future. The election of 2016 was unprecedented and historic. What Happened is the story of that campaign and its aftermath -- both a deeply intimate account and a cautionary tale for the nation.… (more)

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Rating

½ (334 ratings; 3.9)

Media reviews

CounterPunch
This was a brutal cocktail of sensationalized victimhood and mind numbing anecdotes. There were some slightly more wild sucker punches in the later chapters but I couldn’t appreciate many of them. As bad as Hillary is at being a politician, she is much worse at being a human being.
— 1 more
New York Times
Choice quotes have been seeping out for weeks, and I’ll admit that I reacted to one of them — “Now I’m letting down my guard” — as if the smoke alarm had started shrieking in my living room. Why believe her? In her previous books, she measured her words with teaspoons and then sprayed
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 them with disinfectant. Then again, we’ve been told over and over that Clinton is very different in private. And she is now a private citizen. This distinction seems to have made all the difference. “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?”)
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User reviews

LibraryThing member Devil_llama
A detailed look at the 2016 presidential election that defies all the reviews. I have seen headlines screaming "Hillary Settles Scores with Bernie Sanders". If that's what you're expecting, this is not the book for you. I have seen complaints that "Hillary is whining and trying to avoid any
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 responsibility for a poor campaign". If that is the book you are expecting, this is not the book for you. If what you want is solid, wonky analysis interspersed with personal notes and evaluations of what she did wrong, what the press did wrong, what went wrong, and why, then this is the book for you. The prose is clear and lucid, there is no whining, no screaming, no "poor me". In fact, I would say she probably shoulders a bit more of the responsibility for the loss than is truly on her shoulders. You do not have to agree with everything she says to find something in this book, unless you are one of those who is an ideological purist who will not accept any assessment unless it comes out of the mouth of someone you agree with 100%; I am not that sort of person, and found myself disagreeing with Ms. Clinton in several places, usually policy related, without finding myself gritting my teeth and spitting or throwing things. The main complaint I have with this book is the heavy icing of spirituality that borders on negative judgment of those who do not have a spiritual faith based worldview; she could have dug all that out of the book, and she would have lost nothing of the analysis, and would have gained a sharper, more focused view. Otherwise, good solid reading and definitely something worth picking up, even for someone who never reads the memoirs of failed (or successful) political candidates. This is not your usual election, and I think her analysis is much needed, though she does still manage to avoid one clear, in your face assessment: the voters. The one group she lays no blame on is the American public who voted for Trump. Like all politicians, she clings to the image of the voter needing something they are not being given, and manages to talk about bigotry, both racial and sexual, as though it were somehow separate from the real people voting on Election Day.
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LibraryThing member Jessika.C
YASSS Hilary spill that tea. Call me cynical but I called the events way before November 4, 2016. It was like everything was happening in slow motion and the more that was revealed about the current commander in chief and swept under the rug the more I was horrified at the train wreck about to
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 squash the tiny mini cooper on the road. If you listen to the audiobook narrated by the author herself and think “gee she sounds bitter,” well she should be. In essence, she describes having had the dream team of any presidential candidate at her side and they still lost. But putting all that aside it’s a very enjoyable read.

Enough about politics and party affiliations, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a very expressive and passionate woman. This is the story about a woman who was ready to put aside her growing family in order to help this young teenaged nation walk with its head held high with pride. I’ll admit I had no idea what she was about during her run for the presidency. For personal reasons I don’t vote and I wasn’t about to start. I don’t blame anyone for the results nor did I protest them. But one thing that I did agree with was the overlying narrative the media pushed about the personal emails. I didn’t realize how bad it was until Clinton explained it.

Anyways, this book did get a little repetitive. I remember feeling deja vu sometimes wondering if I accidentally replayed a certain chapter or section but it was just Clinton rehashing an event she had mentioned before and explained it in detail later. So if you don’t like that then it may be a problem. One thing that I will give her is how well this book did with my fact-checking. There were multiple things that I questioned and when I went to go look them up I found sources confirming her statements. Her editor, whoever they were, did a great job in keeping events and details in line. Personal statements aside everything she wrote was factual. I really enjoyed this book.
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LibraryThing member rivkat
I bought the audiobook, and began sobbing ten minutes in, because it brought back how America’s white voters broke my heart by choosing that thing instead of this thoughtful, humane, competent (and yes, corporatist) woman based on lies, racism, misogyny and anti-abortion politics. Clinton’s
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 voice is so controlled, it’s like a distillation of everything we did to her over the years—Elizabeth Warren’s audiobook lets you hear her tearing up as she describes the death of a beloved dog, but when Clinton talks about how devastated she was, she’s still even. She only allows chuckles into her voice for moments of humor. As for the content, well, it’s about the 2016 election, so I don’t know if there’s any way I can evaluate it as content.
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LibraryThing member Christine.Backhaus
The best book I have read all year.
LibraryThing member maneekuhi
PSSST, HILLARY, THE CAMPAIGN IS OVER....

Full Disclosure: I am a 73 year old white male. My wife and I have been strong supporters of Hillary (H) from the 2008 election. We have voted for her at every opportunity and we have made significant contributions to her campaigns. We have watched all the
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 debates, and read tons of articles in the Washington Post and New York Times. I feel very sad about H's loss. I think she would have made a very good President, perhaps a great one. Finally, in fairness to the reader, I will try to focus most of my comments on H the author and the content of What Happened (WH), rather than H the campaigner and how effective I thought she was in that role.

This is clearly H's product - I doubt that even one word was written by anyone else, unless cited. It is her language, it is her analysis, it is H proud, H defensive, H regretful, H angry, H strong. I also became aware as I neared the end that I had not found a single typo; I haven't observed a "clean" book in more than twenty years. That would be Hillary also.

In the prefatory Author's Note, H states, "I don't have all the answers". Well, not quite true. This 464 page book is comprehensive, covering all the major events that I can recall. It also addresses a number of minor ones, things that particularly nettled H, and she uses the opportunity to get some annoyances off her chest. Months and months after the election she seems to be still campaigning against Trump. On page 46, she states that our mistakes alone shouldn't define us. A few lines down she says that she tries to learn from her mistakes and do better in the future. Fine, that's nice, a bit of a yawner though. But then she unnecessarily adds "....(Trump) lashes out, demeans, and insults others. " There are a number of similar contrasts drawn; I thought it demeaned H and WH. And as for the comments on page 49, "...Trump spending about 20 percent of his new presidency at his own luxury gold clubs. I sometimes wonder: If you add together his time spent on golf, Twitter, and cable news, what's left?" Not nice, H - not loving and kind. And they're about matters post-election, not really about 'what happened'. These are just two examples; there are many, many more. There's a lot of venting in WH.

H acknowledges her accountability for losing to Trump. She does so a number of times. However, a "but" always seems to follow introducing a lengthy list of terrible things Trump did, or Comey did, or the Russians did. By the time you get through the list of contributions to her downfall, you forget that she has taken accountability. There is an alternative way to structure what happened, and that would be to lay out all the sins of others first, do it once ( Comey/emails seemed to come up again and again) and then wrap up with, "but it the end it all came down to me, I was the candidate, I could have run a better campaign. I lost." Same content, different order, but it makes all the difference in the world. H's way gives her an opportunity to say "I accepted responsibility..." then share the blame in the same breath.. For example, page 392 in a Christine Amanpour interview: "I take absolute responsibility", I replied. "I was the candidate. I was the person who was on the ballot. Then I explained that while we (reviewer's comment: note we) didn't run a perfect campaign, Nate Silver (statistician)....has said that we were on our way to winning until Jim Comey's October 28 letter derailed us....." And though taking responsibility she gives herself a bit of a free pass.

Watching her in those debates, I couldn't understand how anyone could vote for other than H. I think she should have beaten Trump by 10 points; I blame her for the loss. She was dull, her message was dull, her campaign was dull. Trump grabbed headlines every day, while H gave the same tired old speeches. She shouldn't blame the media for relegating Grand Rapids speeches to the back of the paper. Who remembers a H speech?

H opens the chapter "Why" with: "I've spent part of nearly every day since November 8, 2016, wrestling a single question: Why did I lose?". It's a very interesting chapter, certainly the one that will be most read and re-read. There isn't a lot that's new for anyone who has paid attention the last several months but it's interesting to note the items on which she spends a lot of time - Comey again, working-class white women moving away in the final days, media, Jill Stein, demographic analysis, Russia, polls, bigotry, economics, voter suppression. Oddly, not much of Bernie in this chapter. Nor husband Bill who stepped on it more than once but was never criticized in WH. She touched on her speaking fees only briefly and never mentioned any dollar figures she earned from the bigger spenders for those speeches. Why is this so important? Because too many voters felt these speaking fees were payoffs for favors from the Clintons and this was the rather disturbing way they had become rich quick. In other parts of the book she mentions her campaign strategy, but I feel it was not given proper attention in WH. She speaks of re-examining the 2008 campaign and righting all the wrongs of those days. She seemed to expect that would do the trick and that it should have. Not a lot of out of the box thinking there. The environment was so different in 2016, just eight years later. She clearly understands for example the anger of the white middle class, but it seems she came to that understanding too late in the game; the campaign was focused on other things. The Clinton team never drove the agenda, Trump was always in charge. I feel that was never addressed head-on in WH.

A few miscellaneous comments about "What Happened". WH is very well written and it is a comfortable read, rather chatty, just the right tone for this post-mortem. I note that as I write this only 12 days after the book's release, it has 1500 Amazon reviews and averages close to a 5 rating. That seems too generous to me. It's a very good book, but not a great one. I don't agree with a number of H's statements, and I would really like to hear the counter comments from others who were there. H makes many, many references to her mother; I wasn't aware of the closeness before reading this book. H follows the Why chapter with one on Love and Kindness; this chapter didn't work for me at all, nor did the chapter A Day in the Life. The closing chapter was Onward Together, most of which is very nicely done - but she really has to get a new slogan team. I did very much enjoy reading about her return to Wellesley. She does speculate a bit about her future role and I must admit not sharing her enthusiasm for the pursuit of some of the limelight opportunities (the Dems need new faces, hear that Joe? Nancy?). Four stars is a bit of a stretch, but hey, it's Hillary ....and Bill. Thanks to you both for making America a better place.
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LibraryThing member Susan.Macura
This is Hillary Clinton's postmortem of the 2016 presidential election. As such, the reader is very aware the biases that she comes into the project with. However, Clinton does make some compelling arguments as to why lost. While she accepts much of the blame, she also feels that her loss can also
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 be attributed to many things out of her control, things such as the last minute interference by FBI director Jim Comey, Russian meddling and Trump's inability to speak the truth. It was an interesting read.
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LibraryThing member SocProf9740
Now I get to be sad all over again over this massively missed opportunity.
LibraryThing member ToniFGMAMTC
I really enjoyed this. It helped to soothe me. I was not happy how everything went down. She gives her side of everything, but it isn't a crying story. It tells what she did wrong and what other circumstances went wrong. It tells how she got over it, things she turned to in order to feel better. I
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 enjoyed seeing more of her without a guard up. I understand why she has always had to shield herself, but it's nice seeing more of her. She encouraged everyone to follow their dreams and not give up on the government but to get involved. Even though it covers a time that left me depressed, it's an uplifting story. Seeing how smart she is and knowledgeable on issues does make it feel even more insane that she didn't win.
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LibraryThing member bkinetic
I had sympathy for Hilary Clinton before reading this book and even more afterward. I don't admire much of her politics because she so often favors wars of aggression and American hegemony over other nations. But she is a respectable human being who was defeated in the race for president by someone
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 who is not. She offers intelligent observations about herself and the state of the nation. She provides a clear an incisive overview of Russian meddling in the presidential campaign in one of the best chapters of the book.

Despite these pluses, I was disappointed that she left some significant topics unaddressed. She claims that she had few substantive differences with Bernie Sanders, yet is evasive in leaving some key differences unmentioned. Where is the discussion of the content of her highly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers and why she chose not to reveal the transcripts of those speeches? Where is any mention of her historic support for international trade agreements that have exported jobs to foreign countries, including those that prohibit labor unions? Where is any mention of her endorsement of the vicious policies of Henry Kissinger, who was responsible for overthrowing honestly elected governments, including the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the subsequent murder and torture of thousands of Chilean people? Where is any discussion of the moving toward a homeland for the Palestinian people?

Having reached the end of her career, why can't she honestly address these controversial topics that differentiated her policies from those of Bernie Sanders. She seems like she is still running for something and is unwilling to come clean and honestly state her positions on these issues and her reasons for holding them.

Toward the end of the book she dismisses the criticism that she and the Democratic Party have largely abandoned working class voters, still apparently not realizing that working class voters in swing states tipped the election against her. She cites the average Trump voters as relatively well-off, but fails to recognize that relying on statistical averages fails to capture swing working class Trump voters and those who don't vote at all anymore due to being abandoned by the Democratic party.
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LibraryThing member spooks101
Interesting, insightful, intelligent, at times angry, honest, and also, terrifying. This is the story of Hillary Clinton's election. It covers a little of everything. her early life and aspirations, briefly her time as first lady and Secretary of State. but most importantly, the election itself.
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 She is sometimes brutally honest about her own mistakes, but also honest about the election and, as the title aludes, what happened. Trump, Russia, those damn emails and more are all covered. Well worth the read.
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LibraryThing member over.the.edge
What Happened?
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
2017

Wow! Loved this honest and intimate account of her presidential campaign in a twisted and corrupt election. It's really pathetic what she was put through, the lies told about her, and fed to the press......
After reading this, and even more so after reading
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 it..#imwithher #strongertogether #pantsuitnation.

Exceptional. A Must Read.
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LibraryThing member john.cooper
There’s not a sentence in this book that doesn’t give the impression of having been filtered through advisors and lawyers, and can you blame her? This is a woman who’s been accused (demonstrably falsely) of virtually every kind of corruption and conspiracy up to and including murder and who
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 has paid a high price for every slip of the tongue she’s made in the past 26 years. For too many people, her guardedness has contributed to an impression of untruthfulness, although fact-checking organizations found her to be by far the most honest candidate in the 2016 race, primary candidates included. Americans don’t like politicians much, but a female politician is unforgivable. The public calculation and private back-room deals that are an essential part of every politician’s work grate too hard against the American feminine ideals of generosity, warmth, and candor. Every woman in public life is expected to seem natural and to describe herself, if possible, as “a wife, a mother, and an x,” where x, her public role, comes last and least. Imagine any male CEO describing himself as “a husband, a dad, and an innovator” or some such.

Clinton has often said (truthfully) that she’s not a natural politician, and neither is she an exciting author. Something real, a hint of the enthusiasm she must have had as a young activist and which must still be inside, secured like a prisoner’s hope, shines from the sections where she writes about her personal ideals, especially in the section called “Sisterhood” and in the concluding chapter, “Onward Together.” But ultimately, this is a dispiriting read, her intended message of encouragement robbed of force. Her book, like her candidacy, struggles without success against the weight of the same defenses that she developed to survive.
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LibraryThing member Schmerguls
5541. What Happened, by Hillary Rodham Clinton (read 9 Mar 2018) I often read, after a presidential election, a book thereon. After the 2008 election I read, with immense satisfaction, Game Change Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heiliman and Mark
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 Halperin. After the 2012 election I read Double Down Game Change 2012, by the same authors. Deciding what to read as to the 2016 election was more problematical, but I decided to read this book by the loser in that race. It was difficult to read since the result of the election was so traumatic. Some of the book was not pleasant reading, since it was on such a doleful year. But there is a lot of good material in the book and the author says a lot of incisive and worthwhile things, accepting the blame which is hers but also showing how some things worked against her. If 44,000 voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had voted differently the result of the election could have been in accord with the majority of the country's voters . I found the final chapters of the book emotionally vivid and am glad I read the book, even though the election turned out so disappointingly..
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LibraryThing member PuddinTame
Let me start out by saying that I find it difficult to understand why anyone voted for Donald Trump. I disliked him even before his reality show, and my loathing has only grown. One of his supporters told me that the choice was between the business man and the liar, Ha! Trump is a hundred times the
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 liar that HRC is. I voted for HRC, I wanted her to win, she would have made a much better president. I feel sorry for her because she can never catch a break between people worrying about her headbands and her pantsuits, but I never really liked her, and I am not impressed by this book.

Only about 130 pages out of 464 are really about What Happened in the campaign. The rest are chiefly about her happy marriage, her wonderful child, her beloved parents, her darling grandchildren, the quotidian process of campaigning. The last section is about what we need to do (besides hope that Trump family and Pence end up in jail. Soon.) If you have a great deal of interest in reading her glowing view of her happy and productive personal life, you may really enjoy this, which is why I gave it as much as 3-stars. I was bored by this, and I thought the last section would never end. I guess I wasn't feeling terribly sympathetic at that point.

I don't really think that she took responsibility for her campaign's failure. She kept making generic statements taking responsibility, but it seems to me that she almost never took actual responsibilty for any specific thing. It was always yes, but ... . She admitted that calling many of Trump's supporters deplorables was a mistake, but then continued that they were, in fact, deplorable. She also comments that it hurts her feelings that people find her unlikeable. I'm sure it does -- but did she ever think about why that is? What she might do differently?

The Great Cough Coverup encapsulates a lot of what I don't like about HRC. She was so ill that she had to be removed from a 9/11 memorial. Her campaign immediately claimed that it was just that she was dehydrated (again; note to HRC, carry bottles of water). She comes out of her daughter's apartment to show us that she's fine. Later she admits she has pneumonia. Why not admit it in the first place? If they don't want to use the P-word, just say that she was sick in bed, but couldn't bear to miss the memorial. What is this need to react to things by hiding them? When she is forced to admit to them later, it only looks suspicious. One can't help but wonder what she covered up that wasn't discovered. People argue that it is her training as a lawyer, but one might keep in mind that one of the most beloved quotes from Shakespeare is about killing all the lawyers.

I agree that Comey was utterly irresponsible for issuing the October letter about the emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop, particularly since he didn't publicize his probe into the Russian contacts. But the whole thing would likely never have happened if she had turned the emails over to the State Department in a timely matter -- say within three years. Would she ever have turned them over if not for the Benghazi hearings? But I suspect this is another example of a desire to maintain control coming back to bite her. What she did may not have been illegal, and may have been done by other people (here's hoping they are also investigated) but others testified that it was against State Department protocols that were then in place, and that security experts tried to tell her that it was a bad idea. She never addresses those claims. She excuses herself for not keeping all the government emails because she sent them to other people with .gov email addresses; does she not understand that doing so makes it difficult to find them? Anyone searching for them has to guess who they might have been sent to, and hope that person didn't assume there was no need to retain what HRC should have had in her own account. If this was all so innocuous, why did she initially take so long to speak to reporters? Then she tries to tell us she is coming clean by having the official emails still on the server released when the main issue was about the emails she deleted. Her staff members refuse to turn over their computers unless they get immunity -- another example of making oneself look suspicious. Then she tells us that she didn't understand the confidential markings (i.e. (c)) Does she think that sounding stupid or ignorant is better than sounding irresponsible or arrogant? Yes, Comey was very wrong, but she and her campaign helped to inflate the story.

There were a number of disadvantages that HRC could do little about, like misogyny and the Russian interference, but the election was so close, a few tens of thousands of votes in key states could have swung it. It's just a pity that she added to her own problems.

An interesting book to read in view of her problems with some of the swing states is Joan C. William's White Working Class : Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Next I am going to read Shattered : Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes In his review of the latter, John Elving of NPR remarks: "The Clinton we see here seems uniquely qualified for the highest office and yet acutely ill-suited to winning it."
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LibraryThing member brianinbuffalo
Clinton backers will undoubtedly credit her for candidly holding herself accountable for some of the problems that manifested themselves during the twist-filled 2016 presidenital campaign. Detractors will suggest that she places too much of the blame for her loss on what she viewed as the media's
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 rabid preoccupation with her email controversy and then-FBI director James Comey's handling of the matter. One thing is clear: Clinton's deep-dive offers an abundant number of behind-the-scenes insights into one of the most astounding presidential campaigns in U.S. history. It does a get a bit "preachy" near the end and the literary dissection probably could have been adequately completed in fewer words, but the work definitely worth exploring for people who have an interest in politics and American history.
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LibraryThing member sweetiegherkin
In this book, Hillary Clinton talks about the 2016 presidential election as well as other parts of her political (and personal) life and thoughts about politics. The book kind of follows a thematic, rather than chronological order, so she moves around from Donald Trump's inauguration day to her
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 decision to run for president in 2016 to being a young mother to being on the 2016 campaign trail to her time in college and so forth and so on. I found this a bit of a jumpy narrative, although it mostly works for getting her point across. Clinton has a lot of important things to say about our country and its current problems with racism, sexism, a political system that could use some fixing up, etc. She continues to lay out progressive policies, complete with statistics and history to back them up. And despite what the critics say, she does not blame everything on the planet for her loss in the 2016 election except herself. She talks about the mistakes she made, but she does also speak to the other issues that all conflated together to propel Trump's win. It's a thought-provoking read (and well narrated on audio by Clinton herself), although it obviously appeals most to Clinton's fans and political junkies/policy wonks. If you are either of those two, I'd recommend this book for a serious look at the problems in our nation and some ideas on how to move forward.
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LibraryThing member patsaintsfan
Well, this was quite an interesting read... I decided to read it out of curiosity, and, without getting political, I liked her openness and rawness. She certainly shared a lot of feelings, and took major responsibility for her loss. Of course, there are many factors that went into the outcome of
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 the election... and the truth may never really be known. IT IS POLITICS after all.
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LibraryThing member banjo123
Well, Clinton isn't a great writer, though her prose is definitely serviceable; and I think she is still a little close to the election to be brilliantly insightful. But I liked reading this book, I learned more about Clinton, more about the election and campaign process. It made me sad, because
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 she would've been a good president, and she would have won if it weren't for things like unfair press coverage, voter suppression, sexist expectations and James Comey. Clinton lays all of this out, but she is also open about her own shortcomings, and she tries to end on a hopeful note.

I enjoyed reading about the Clintons' marriage. She has a very endearing passage where she describes their day to day life. "He is reading this over my shoulder in our kitchen with our dogs underfoot, and in a minute he will reorganize our bookshelves for the millionth time, which means I will not be able to find any of my books, and once I learn the new system, he;ll just redo it again, but I don't mind because he really loves to organize those bookshelves."
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LibraryThing member BingeReader87
This book was a surprise hit for me. I found myself really interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff with the 2016 election. But what I found even more interesting was learning more about Hillary Clinton and her views. This book had some really good ideas about what we can do as a country to fix
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 some real issues in this country and, despite what people have said, she took responsibility for the loss in the election.

I'll admit that I was a little bored reading this at times, but it more than made up for it, in between those moments. Highly recommend checking this out, no matter what your political views are.
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LibraryThing member c.archer
I would give it more stars if I could. This came from her heart and spoke to mine.
LibraryThing member eo206
I tried. I really tried to get into this book. It is interesting enough but the storytelling just didn't pull me in. Maybe I'll try it again later, but for now there are more interesting books waiting to be explored.
LibraryThing member adam.currey
Overall, an interesting read. Was fascinating to learn how many different factors played into Hillary's loss. The book tends to get a little bogged down in the first half with a lot of not-as-interesting stuff about what it's like to run a campaign and so on, but picks up in the second half.
LibraryThing member crtsjffrsn
In what can only be described as a candid and open narrative, Hillary Rodham Clinton shares with readers her thoughts, experiences, and feelings during the course of the 2016 Presidential Election. Covering everything from what influenced her decision to run in the first place and the momentum of
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 her campaign to what was going through her head during the debates and how she handled election night and the time since her unexpected and unprecedented loss

Before picking this up, I had heard the commentary that this was just Hillary listing out excuses for her loss, but it is not that at all. There's a sense of honesty in the narrative, while the author is clear to recognize that what readers are getting her perspective and opinion. But when one considers how much the media was focused on her opponent during the election cycle (and he always told everyone exactly what he was thinking), it provides a balance to the existing public narrative. I personally also found it to be an inspiring read--I'm quite glad I picked it up.
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LibraryThing member annbury
Meh. A garbage book, with a lot of filler on her life and times, If you want to find out what happened, you can read the less than 10% of this book ( Why) or you can read Donna Brazile's book on the hacking of the DNC. Hillary was the worst candidate ever put up by the 'Democratic party; she could
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 not rouse the troops the way that Trump did, and that is why she lost. Period, She does not know anything, I recognize that she and other women have had a bad time, but she is an idiot,
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LibraryThing member caanderson
I wanted to read her book because I wanted to hear from Hillary Clinton, herself. She is the one who ran for the office of President of the United States and her word is the only person I would trust on this subject. The news media, political commentators, republicans, and the fake media made this
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 one of the ugliest election in history. I’m glad I read her book and I see how much harder women have to fight to be the president of the United States.
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Awards

Language

English

Original language

English

Original publication date

2017-09-12

Physical description

512 p.; 6 inches

ISBN

1501175564 / 9781501175565

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