www.nytimes.com/2003/06/10/books/10KAKU.html?ex=1055822400&en=fdd25594a0801303&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE -> query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DEFDC1239F933A25755C0A9659C8B63
Clinton's penchant for blaming enemies, from political opponents to a ''vast right-wing conspiracy,'' for her and her husband's failures and travails. Clinton, who has repeatedly invoked a ''zone of privacy'' around her and her family, talks in this book about noticing Bill Clinton's narrow wrists and tapered fingers when she first met him at Yale Law School in the early 1970's; Clinton's interview with Barbara Walters, which was broadcast on ABC on Sunday), ''Living History'' is a mishmash of pious platitudes about policy (not unlike those found in the author's earlier book ''It Takes a Village''); Overall the book has the overprocessed taste of a stump speech, the calculated polish of a string of anecdotes to be delivered on a television chat show. Clinton is fond of talking about herself in lofty terms as a symbolic figure. An age in which tough, talented women can ascend to high political office but often experience their greatest popularity when they are perceived as less-threatening victims. The book struggles to turn the author's many contradictions -- the policy wonk who poses for Vogue; It is a book that purports to deal with the many controversies and scandals in Bill Clinton's campaigns and presidency, presumably to get these issues behind her before she contemplates running for the White House herself. Yet the book skates over the problems the Clinton administration faced in its rocky debut and in the impeachment crisis and skims over details of matters like Whitewater and ''travelgate'' while expending a startling amount of space on her trips abroad and her personal appearance. We learn that Bill was flummoxed when Hillary had her hair permed in 1974, but we do not learn why billing records from the Rose Law Firm, included in the independent counsel's subpoenas, mysteriously surfaced in the White House, after having been missing for months. Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, wore long, flowing tunics over loose pants during a trip to India and Pakistan, but we never learn about President Clinton's controversial last-minute pardons. The Gennifer Flowers episode is dealt with in a highly cursory manner. Flowers claimed that she had had a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton, Mrs. Clinton told his wife of his involvement with that intern, their adviser Robert S. Starr overrode her anger at her husband over Monica Lewinsky. Clinton observes that it was she, not her husband, who decided not to turn over Whitewater documents to the press, and that it was she who strenuously argued against appointing an independent counsel. This book ratifies the dynamic between the Clintons depicted in the press and in memoirs by White House officials, that Bill Clinton was the more indecisive, forgiving one, while Hillary was the more combative, organized one. Clinton's childhood and her memories of her mother, a closet Democrat, and her father, a ''rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican'' who warned Hillary about the perils of waste. These sections have a homey immediacy lacking in the rest of ''Living History,'' which for all its roller-coaster drama -- all the political scandals, marital woes and startling comebacks and reinventions -- radiates the faintly stale air (particularly unnerving in the audio versions of the memoir) of being the carefully rehearsed and elided statements of a professional pol intent on turning a book tour into the first leg of another campaign.
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