What Happened by Hillary Clinton

I had wanted to read this book when it was originally released back in September 2017, but I ended up forgetting Hillary Clinton existed (until the next time she consumes enough power to rise again) and it took my girlfriend's sister getting me the book for Christmas that year to say, "Oh yeah, Hillary wrote a book about that whole 2016 thing lol". I put off reading it for about another month as I was busy with another book and frankly, I was slightly intimidated by Hillary's long, throbbing whine-o-logue.

notice how hillary clinton's name comprises an entire 3/4ths of the cover

This book is fucking long. In fact, it's 512 pages long (though only around 470 are actual book, the rest is extensive indexing and acknowledgements). When I heard Hillary Clinton wrote a book complaining about how she got Trump'sterd in the 2016 election, I thought it'd be a quick 250-so page explanation of 'her side of the story' that would touch down on things like the great e-mail scandal, her thoughts on Trump and some insider campaign tidbits. The book is, to its credit, all of this: it's just a lot of this. The book also goes into great, great lengths about Hillary's personal history.

There's nooOOOoooOOOOooooOOOOOO reason for this god damn thing to be over 500 pages long. Lengthy stretches are just sort of Hillary giving a playback of boring things that happened or mentioning stuff like, "oh yeah by the way, on the campaign I had this friend who made us treats and my campaign staff used to piss into their socks while we were on the road so we didn't have to stop as much". The issue is that the book is actually more of an auto-biography about Hillary and her life and less of a book about, you know, WHAT HAPPENED during the 2016 election. The book is rather interesting when it's talking about Hillary's perspective on the (wildly stupid) e-mail scandal that the media turned into a two year long unending debacle of overblown conspiracy baiting. The book is a little harder to make your way through when Hillary is investing 100 pages into giving you details about how her mother grew up and how some boring side-story happened while they were campaigning or whatever.

If Hillary wanted to go into less interesting (and less related to the title of the fucking book) details, that's fine. But she should have gotten all of the 2016 election-related things out of the way and THEN told us all about her mother's history growing up and how it changed her mother and how that ultimately changed her (Hillary's) life outlook, or telling us about how her campaign team was really great and super diverse and blah blah blah.

But, other than length and questionably interesting content, the book is fairly well written and composed. If you don't mind, or even enjoy, all the extra stuff, then you'll enjoy this book pretty well. It's amusing, because this book is such a drastic opposite to Trump's campaign book, a short-form poorly written turd that I also covered on this blog. Where Trump-ola-cola's book was a short overview of Trump's campaign policies and strategy (while also laden heavily with typos all over the place), Hillary's is a tome-esque auto-biography stitched together with a retelling of the 2016 campaign while managing to be fairly well-written.

There's still quite a bit of pointless whining, however. Hillary gripes in no short manner about Trump. While she never devotes much time to specifically bitching about how she thinks Trump is the anti-Christ, she constantly snipes at him throughout the book. A lot of this is at least fairly understandable, considering how stretched poor Hillary must be feeling after the good long ramming the media gave her about e-mails. For the record, if you're still confused on that whole e-mail thing: Basically, during Hillary's service as Secretary of State, she and her team used a personal e-mail server because of convoluted bullshit with official US gub'ment e-mail accounts that made it pointlessly difficult to use your 'official' government ID for different e-mail accounts. Thus, literally no one in Washington bothers with using private servers for all of their e-mail accounts.

The result was that Hillary Clinton and her team sent thousands of boring office e-mails to each other over the course of eight years, with the looming potential that "but maybe ONE of those e-mails was missile codes/titty pixs to vlad_putin_2003@hotmail.com" causing one of the biggest media stirs in human history. Whether you think Hillary is crooked beyond the fake e-mail drama is beside the point (personally I think she maintains a sex dungeon full of government-cloned Bill Clintons, and swaps clones out on a whim for public appearances), the main point is that Hillary deserved some well-earned bitching time over e-mails and it's interesting to get her takeaway and side of the story regarding the whole thing.

I guess I can't complain too much about all of the side-stuff. I mean, I knew criminally little about the Flint, Michigan water crisis (including how it even happened and what caused it), something which Hillary covered rather in-depth. So, good job Hillary. You told me more about the state of Michigan than anyone else ever did, and a lot more than I ever personally wished to know. That counts for something, I guess.

I suppose what it comes down to is that Hillary produced a well-written 500-page compendium complaining about how much she hates Trump, how unfair the media was to her and lots of personal ego-stroking about how great she thinks she is and how she'd be doing a much better job than Trump (she promises, u guys!). Still, it's completely accurate to say that Hillary has an extensive history in professional politics and political networking. I wish her book focused a lot more on that and a lot less on describing her boring entourage of campaign buddiez and how her mother had a shitty childhood or whatever.

The book was kind of hard for me to get through. In fact, I nearly gave up on it several times, but there was enough interesting chapters that I was able to slog on. It also ends on a pretty good note, and I at least found the final pages easy to read through. It's also now dawned on me that this review is massively tl;dr and really only says one thing: The book is good but also boring and too long. Just as Hillary wastes 500 pages to tell us 200 pages worth of interesting stuff, I now too have created a blog post that is much longer than it needed to be. Have I slain the beast, only to become myself the beast? Wow, that's some really deep shit.

FINAL POINTLESS NUMERICAL SCORE:

7/10

It's not a bad book at all, it's just tedious to work through if you don't care about the parts that are Hillary's life auto-biography. Also, I made no less than five references to sex or sexual obscenities within this review. Freudian slips concerning repressed urges to fuck Hillary Clinton, or is this blog just crass and stupid? You be the judge.