And I say this as someone who liked Clinton and the Clinton presidency--the book could have been much better.
The first half, up until he becomes President, is good writing--there are interesting characters, he does a really good job of describing his childhood (parts of that are really moving, actually), and all the stuff about quirky local politics is material you wouldn't find anywhere else. The story of how he managed to become governor of Arkansas reads almost like a political thriller, albeit the kind of weirdly funny thriller that the Coen Brothers would come up with.
Once he becomes President, the book kind of goes downhill. In a lot of parts it reads like a diary, and in the last 400 pages there are probably about 15 that aren't already a matter of public record--the rest you'll already know if you read the morning paper regularly. (Most of those 15 pages have to do with Clinton's attempts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.) In the acknowledgments he gives effusive credit to "Justin Cooper," who helped him out a lot over the writing process--it seemed to be tacit admission that Clinton had used a ghostwriter at least some of the time. Near the end it gets really self-serving, too, as if Clinton had started to believe his own hype and was trying to enshrine his own political legacy before historians could get to it.
Though I wouldn't say it isn't worth reading, I would say that Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars is a far better book--if you're interested in a good political history of that period, get that instead.
The first half, up until he becomes President, is good writing--there are interesting characters, he does a really good job of describing his childhood (parts of that are really moving, actually), and all the stuff about quirky local politics is material you wouldn't find anywhere else. The story of how he managed to become governor of Arkansas reads almost like a political thriller, albeit the kind of weirdly funny thriller that the Coen Brothers would come up with.
Once he becomes President, the book kind of goes downhill. In a lot of parts it reads like a diary, and in the last 400 pages there are probably about 15 that aren't already a matter of public record--the rest you'll already know if you read the morning paper regularly. (Most of those 15 pages have to do with Clinton's attempts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.) In the acknowledgments he gives effusive credit to "Justin Cooper," who helped him out a lot over the writing process--it seemed to be tacit admission that Clinton had used a ghostwriter at least some of the time. Near the end it gets really self-serving, too, as if Clinton had started to believe his own hype and was trying to enshrine his own political legacy before historians could get to it.
Though I wouldn't say it isn't worth reading, I would say that Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars is a far better book--if you're interested in a good political history of that period, get that instead.