The Books of Hillary Clinton


Unique Voice by Hillary ClintonYoung First Lady Hillary Clinton photo from Invitation to White House BookSenator Hillary Rodham Clinton book cover photo - Living HistoryPresidential Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton book cover picture- Hard Choices

Everyone is publishing books in Amazon’s Kindle Store — even Hillary Clinton. She’s running for President now, and in a weird twist, her whole life story is spread across Amazon’s store in a series of books. Over the last 18 years she’s written three books, and each one is available as Kindle ebook.

For a shortcut point your browser to
tinyurl.com/HillaryEbooks

America is polarized when it comes to politics, but I always try to understand the candidates from both parties. And there’s a certain amount of history and pageantry that goes along with the role of begin a nation’s first lady. I’m disappointed that there’s no Kindle edition for the book “Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets”, which included a fun history of various pets in the White House, plus an inspiring story about how the children’s letters are answered at the United States Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home. And her time in the White House saw the publication of a collection of Hillary’s own writings, plus a lush coffee table book Hillary wrote about state dinners and life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But here’s the three Hillary Clinton books that are available as Kindle ebooks.

 
It Takes a Village book cover by Hillary Clinton

It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (Updated in 2006)

In 2006 a special “10th Anniversary Edition” was released for Hillary’s 1996 book which included a new introduction written by U.S. Senator Clinton. The topic of children only leads a larger look at society itself and the issues facing us as we try to raise the next generation, according to the book’s description on Amazon, and Hillary’s new introduction even acknowledges the arrival of the internet to our complex global village. One reviewer at The Christian Science Monitor gushed that “it would be a loss if the nation missed this opportunity to address [these] issues…” But I was surprised that even one Amazon reviewer who described themselves as “more right than left” thought Hillary’s writing style was enjoyable, adding “I like to think I can be part of that middle ground — a right-winger who appreciates the intelligent passionate argument that she brings to the table. ”


Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton book cover photo - Living History

Living History (2003)

Did you know Hillary’s uncle once tried to kill himself? Or that her mother was nearly abandoned by Hillary’s grandmother? This book offers a surprisingly personal glimpse into the life of a girl from Illinois who grew up to be America’s First Lady, its Secretary of State, and a Senator from New York — and it’s also her highest-rated book among Amazon’s reviewers. I liked how this book pulled together the different parts of her family history, which shows just how much America changed over the last 100 years, especially during the 1960s (when Hillary was in college). Hillary started life as a Republican — before she was 21, she’d already attended the Republican National Convention (where she met Frank Sinatra and John Wayne). There’s also stories about hearing Martin Luther King speak, the women who inspired her, and of course, her life with a young man named Bill Clinton who became President in 1992.


Presidential Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton book cover picture- Hard Choices

Hard Choices (2014)

Hillary’s most recent book — published just last year — sprung back onto Amazon’s best-seller list when HIllary announced her candidacy. Six days later, it’s still one of Amazon’s 10 best-selling books in their history section’s category for books about women in history — and in their biographies category for political leaders and notable people. It opens with a funny story about hiding in the back of a van to avoid the press on the way to a secret meeting with Barack Obama back in 2008. Hillary becomes Secretary of State, and this book offers fascinating details about the way the U.S. ultimately handled other world foreign leaders. “[O]nce Clinton gets rolling, she does what’s most valuable in this kind of memoir,” wrote The Washington Post, “which is to take readers inside her meetings — sketching portraits of the world leaders with whom she did business…” There’s a revelation about how the U.S. arrived at its (interim) nuclear agreement with Iran in 2013, and colorful stories like Vladimir Putin offering to take Bill Clinton along on an expedition to tag polar bears. “The book includes a lot of information that we never got from the media,” wrote one Amazon reviewer, who described the book as a “wonderful walk through history.”

For a shortcut to Amazon’s Hillary Clinton books, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/HillaryEbooks

Amazon Discounts “Best Books of November”

Cover of Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson

Amazon’s created another fun web page to “lure” customers into buying more new Kindle ebooks. They’ve announced their “Best Books of the Month” — their editors personal picks — which will all be available at a 40% discount for the whole month of November. And Amazon’s also found a fun new use for their “Amazon Books” page on Facebook. To attract interest in these newly-discounted books, they’ve also started posting “Great Sentences from our Best Books of November.”

So what’s on the list? Their “Spotlight Selection” is Steve Jobs, a new biography by Walter Isaacson (a former managing editor at Time magazine). It became Amazon’s #1 best-selling book the week
that Jobs died before it was even released (based on pre-order sales) — and it’s still Amazon’s #1 best-selling book. Now it’s available as a Kindle ebook for just $16.99 (though the print edition usually retails for $35.00) — and it’s received the ultimate review from my friend Wendy. She told me her three-year-old son requested that she read the biography to him as a bedtime story. “We mostly concentrated on the photos and captions,” she told me today, “but he fell asleep very quickly.” But it still made her geeky husband very proud.

Amazon’s also selected the best fiction books for November — including the first collection of short stories ever by author Don DeLillo. “From one of the greatest writers of our time…” Amazon explains in their product description, “written between 1979 and 2011, chronicling – and foretelling – three decades of American life.” In the title story, two nuns in the south Bronx see the ghost of a child named Esmerelda. And there’s also an intriguing story called “Human Moments in World War III,” where two orbiting astronauts start picking up an American radio broadcast — from 50 years ago!

The book is called The Angel Esmerelda, and it won’t be shipped until November 15th — a week from next Tuesday. But Amazon’s already begun sharing some quotes on Facebook. It must be fun to be the editor at Amazon who gets to decide which “great sentence” to share. They’ve chosen two from The Angel Esmerelda — though it’s not clear what story they’re from.


“Vollmer has never said a stupid thing in my presence. It is just his voice that is stupid, a grave and naked bass, a voice without inflection or breath.”

“He spoke of distances in meters and kilometers and it took me a while to understand that this was not an affectation so much as a driving need to convert units of measurement more or less instantaneously.”

And there’s quotes from other books on the Facebook page for “Amazon Books” — including this intriguing sentence from an exploration of American oddballs that’s called Pulphead.


“He had touched death, or death had touched him, but he seemed to find life no less interesting for having done so.”

But one true crime book actually came from long interviews with “mafia royalty” over three years — the man who helped the Medellin Cartel smuggled cocaine into America. “As Wright’s tape recorder whirred and Roberts unburdened himself of hundreds of jaw-dropping tales, it became clear that perhaps no one in history had broken so many laws with such willful abandon,” reads the book’s description on Amazon.
At one point the criminal “became so powerful that he attracted the attention of the Republican Party’s leadership, was wooed by them, and even was co-opted by the CIA for which he carried out its secret agenda.” The title of the book? American Desperado: My Life–From Mafia Soldier to Cocaine Cowboy to Secret Government Asset. And Amazon’s identified some of the books most tantalizing quotes which they’re sharing on Facebook.


“They say crime doesn’t pay. What a farce.”

“The Medellin cartel was beyond evil. They were like Walmart.”

There’s also a book by a Nobel Prize winner — Daniel Kahneman, who won the Economic Sciences award for challenging the rationality of decision-making, and has finally collected his thoughts together
into a single book. He identifies “fast” thinking — our intuitive emotional responses, which have extraordinary power, but which also influences our more logical “slow” thinking. The book’s title is Thinking, Fast and Slow — and it’s hard to resist the idea of a book which could challenge the way we view our own thoughts!

I remember an aging author who once said we like to read because, just for that moment, there’s an order and a pattern to our experiences, giving a clear “dramatic structure” to life, which is otherwise messy with chaos. I thought of that line when I read Amazon’s “Great Sentence” from Daniel Kahneman’s new book — and it made me crave the security of books that much more. He wrote:


“The world makes much less sense than you think.”

But further down their Facebook page, Amazon also seemed to offering a “counter-quote” from the same book — which shows just how rich a reading experience can be.


“Experts are just humans … They are dazzled by their own brilliance and hate to be wrong.”

To bring this all back around — to me that sounds a lot like Steve Jobs!

Keith Richards vs. the Kindle

Keith Richards

He’s the lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones, and just for today Amazon’s slashed the price on his best-selling autobiography for U.S. customers to just $3.99. (“You Save: $26.00,” Amazon’s web page reminds helpfully, calculating the total savings at 87%.) The 576-page memoir was already on my wish list — and apparently a lot of other people wanted it too, since it’s skyrocketed to the #3 spot on Amazon’s list of the best-selling ebooks!

The U.K. edition is £4.99, and in America it’s already spent 89 days on Amazon’s list of the top 100 best-selling ebooks, as curious readers snatched up the truth behind the legendary life of the 67-year-old rock star. (“For many years I slept, on average, twice a week,” Richards writes in the book. “This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes…”) GQ magazine declared him their writer of the year just last week at the Royal Opera House in London. And at a ceremony for the magazine’s “Men of the Year” awards, Richards revealed that his biography is already being adapted into a movie. (Though Richards also joked that he’s dreading the casting call. “The idea of a succession of Keith Richards coming down is horrifying!”)

But here’s one of the most interesting surprises about his life: Keith Richards loves books! “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully,” Richards once said. There’s the church, “which belongs to God and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.” A British newspaper remembered the quote when reporting that later in life, Richards even considered professional training in librarian skills, just so he could arrange his vast collection of books using the Dewey decimal system! “He is in fact an avid bookworm who has taken great pride in developing libraries inside his homes in Sussex and Connecticut… The 66-year-old is said to have started painstakingly arranging copies of rare books about the history of early American rock and the Second World War…”

It’s ironic that his biography is the only book by Richards that’s available in Amazon’s Kindle store. (Although there’s also a book called “What Would Keith Richards Do?: Daily Affirmations from a Rock and Roll Survivor,” as well as “Stone Me: The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards.”) But it’s only in his recent biography that you get the whole, sprawling life story — and I like how he adopted a mock Charles Dickens style for each chapter’s headings. (“Chapter One: In which I am pulled over by police officers in Arkansas during our 1975 US tour and a standoff ensues…”)

Amazon declared it one of the best books of the month when Richards released it last October, saying Life “captures the rhythm of his voice so effortlessly that reading his tale is like sharing a pint with an old friend — one who happens to be one of the most iconic guitarists of all time.” There’s also some fun pictures of the wild rock star as a young boy, since his book even covers his formative years growing up in Dartford, England. (“Chapter Two… I discover Elvis via Radio Luxemboug… I morph from choirboy to school rebel and get expelled.”) “Why does Keith want to undercut his legend?” asked one reviewer on Amazon.com. “Because he has much better stories to tell. And in the 547-page memoir he wrote with James Fox, he serves them up like his guitar riffs — in your face, nasty, confrontational, rich, smart, and, in the end, unforgettable.”

I like how Amazon’s page for the biography shows you its most-highlighted passages. (“Friendship is a diminishing of distance between people…and to me it’s one of the most important things in the world.”) 177 different people wanted to highlight that observation in their ebook version of Richards’ biography — and 93 more people highlighted a passage about the joy of playing music. “You’re elevated because you’re with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings…you always want to go back there. It’s flying without a license.”

A reviewer at The Wall Street Journal enjoyed the candor, writing “it’s quite likely that no rock musician has ever written so keenly about the joys of making music.” And in the audiobook version you can actually listen for that passion in Richards own voice, since it’s read by Richards himself, along with Johnny Depp and musician Joe Hurley. (It was voted Amazon’s best audiobook of 2010, according to Wikipedia.) Another reviewer (cited by Wikipedia) even felt that the book belonged in that rare “canon of genuinely great rock literature.” But mostly I’m just delighted that I’ll finally get a chance to purchase this book at a very attractive price.

“There’s something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together,” Richards writes at one point. “This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It’s really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it’s all for one purpose, and there’s no flies in the ointment, for a while…

“It’s really jazz – that’s the big secret. Rock and roll ain’t nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.”