Hillary's Choice
 Gail Sheehy
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 1999 Random House NY USA
  ISBN: 0375503447


This book is available in new & used condition from $5.00

This is the story of a woman & a marriage, both so famous the world over that we think we know everything there is to know. Here America's First Lady becomes fully human as the daughter of her parents & the child of her times, place & opportunity.

For the past eight years, Hillary Rodham Clinton's every move, decision & reaction has been magnified by thousands of cameras & millions of eyes pinned on the First Family's life. So much so they have almost become archetypes, caricatures in our lives.

That Mrs. Clinton's most intimate relationships have been scrutinized in the reflected glare of her husband's actions has left this person rather faded, two dimensional when in fact, she is a woman of many facets including humor, commitment & dignity.

Hillary's biographer, the brilliant Gail Sheehy, has a telling style & an absorbing way with words. She vividly recounts Hillary Rodham Clinton's journey from oldest child in the cocoon of a Midwest suburb through those tumultuous 1960s as a student to the 1970s as a lawyer, wife, mother & coach to the political candidate of her choice.

I am not a fan of the Clintons yet Hillary's span of years mirror mine & I was enthralled by Gail Sheehy's attention to odd details that explained so much of what makes Hillary tick. In doing so readers of Hillary's Choice cannot but find out what makes their ownselves tick because at each moment of choice we have to ask ourselves: what would I do?

Hillary Rodham Clinton comes off, in this biography, as a thinking woman - more in her head than in her body. More interested in ideas than clothes, in social issues than sex, in loyalty more than flattery.

This First Lady certainly sustained some severe knocks long before she stepped into the limelight beside her handsome husband & all through this book I kept hearing a refrain that has balanced my own life: So what? How shall we get the job done?

While I finished Hillary's Choice with a distinct feeling of empathy & respect for this fruit of the American psyche, for this wife, mother, political wunderkind & winner, I also know her choices are so far removed from mine as to be from another culture entirely. Or perhaps it is I who am out of place?

Also by Gail Sheehy: Lovesounds; Speed is of the Essence; Panthermania; Hustling; Passages; Pathfinders; Spirit of Survival; Character: America's Search for Leadership; Gorbachev: The Man Who Changed the World; The Silent Passage; New Passages; And also reviewed Understanding Men's Passages: Discovering the New Map of Men's Lives
(04/30/00)

Rebecca