Clinton biography maraniss
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FIRST IN HIS CLASS A Biography of BillClinton. By David Maraniss. Illustrated. 512 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $25.
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DAVID MARANISS, a reporter at The Washington Post, has written a useful biography of a President still in office. It is fair, fun to read and extremely well researched, despite its subject's unwillingness to cooperate. I have misgivings about some of Mr. Maraniss's opinions and the way the book's narrative appears to be dictated bygd current controversies, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend "First in His Class" to anyone interested in Mr. Clinton's life before he became President.
As the book's title indicates, Mr. Maraniss portrays Mr. Clinton as the leading member of the generation that came of age during the 1960's. He shows how Mr. Clinton stood out in each setting -- high school in Hot Springs, college at Georgetown, Oxford University, Yale Law School and then the Governor's mansion
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The Clinton Enigma
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss, regarded by his peers as the nation’s leading specialist on Bill Clinton, sat in a darkened television studio in New York on the night of August 17 and watched the president deliver his curious apologia confessing that he had misled the nation about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. As Maraniss, the author of First in His Class, the highly acclaimed Clinton biography, listened to the president’s words that night, it struck him that he had heard them all before, though never in one speech, and that in those kvartet and a half minutes Clinton had revealed all the contradictory qualities of his tumultuous life and political career.
In this insightful new book, drawing from the biography and his writings for The Washington Post, Maraniss dissects the speech as a revelation of the president’s entire life. Alternately reckless and cautious, righteous and repentant, evasive and forgetful, relying on
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First in His Class: A Biography Of Bill Clinton - Softcover
Review
Lots of people have put forth theories on what makes Bill Clinton tick, but the most trustworthy source may be David Maraniss of the Washington Post. Maraniss won a Pulitzer covering Clinton's campaign, and his book on the man is nonpareil; you simply can't understand Clinton without reading Maraniss's anaylsis of his past. When Bill Clinton is good, he is very, very good, and when he's bad, he's exactly like he has been all his life. Fair-minded but no apologist, Maraniss is essentially an inspiring reporter who, virtually alone among Americans, has troubled to interview Clinton's Oxford classmates and therefore knows that Clinton was, according to them, not lying when he said he "never inhaled"; his classmates devoted hours to teaching Bill to inhale, but he just couldn't do it. Maraniss also casts light on what Clinton did imbibe intellectually at Oxford; precisely what he did to elude the draft, and its mor