Regarding My Life by Clinton

Judging from the excerpt, no. 'Readable', perhaps.

Grammatically, i find no faults which i do not suspect to be the product of faulty transcription. Rhetorically, however, i find it pedestrian. I am not fond of autobiographies however.


It was a dark and stormy night . . .

I just bought a hardcover My Life from a bookshop in China. The Chinese version My Life seems okay. I could not find its English version in China while shipping fee would be very high if I decided to buy it from the US. However, I googled it, and found its text in some websites. Why I posted this thread is because I am preparing to consider My Life as an good example for English writing. As an example, the grammar and rhetoric skills of the book should be highly excellent, or else I fear I would be misled.

So I ask you for your kind ideas about the book's writing skills because my ability of properly appreciating an original English work is very limited for the time being.

Thank you.

Excerpt from My Life:

Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital
in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out
of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend's ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered "no"?-she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he
always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.
Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldn't
move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping a
branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.
That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All my life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who gave me life.
When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy's porch in Hope, a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, "You're Bill Blythe's son. You look just like him." I beamed for days.
In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to her and said, "I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night." He then told
Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.

In 1993, on Father's Day, my first as President, theWashington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and many smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didn't know, including the fact that my
father had probably been married three times before he met Mother, and apparently had at least two more children.
My father's other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written me during the '92 campaign but had received no reply. I don't remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the other bullets we were dodging then, it's possible that my staff kept it from me. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving.
Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern California. We had a happy visit and since then we've corresponded in holiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish I'd known about him a long time ago.
Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents' marriage license, a photo of my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about "our baby" to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor's office. I'm sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I've never met her.
This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that my father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, that's all she needed to know as her own life moved toward its end. As for me, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all, but given the life I've led, I could hardly be surprised that
my father was more complicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century.
In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, several newspapers published a story on my father's war record, with a snapshot of him in uniform.
Shortly afterward, I received a letter from Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing him how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by what he had learned from the soldier who called him "Little GI Joe," he opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the American dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn't had the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had happened to him. Then, he said, "On Memorial Day of this year, I was thumbing through a copy of the New YorkDaily Newswith my morning coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the United States."

Some of the finest, lucid, simple expository prose which i have read in recent years was written by Simon Schama. I have a predilection for history, which is why i have read him, but i also studied English, American and French literature at university, and am not exactly ignorant of other authors or of style.

Hi Setanta,

Schama has taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard. Professor Simon Schama, who has been made a CBE, has taken British history to a wider audience?

Yes, one of his finest writing efforts is Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations. I cannot recommend that book too highly. Some of his finest expository writing is to be found in The Embarrassment of Riches.

Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations
By Simon Schama

The acclaimed historian of the French Revolution and of the Dutch Golden Age here turns his attention to America, with imaginative reconstructions of the death of General Wolfe at Quebec, and of the gruesome murder in the family of Wolfe's great chronicler, the Bostonian Francis Parkman. What Schama reveals is a history he cannot classify, an anarchic and unpredictable history, a history of stories.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: £8.99
Web Price: £6.74

http://www.granta.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=135
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The price seems acceptable.

But I don't want to pay that shipping fee that is horribly higher than the book itself.

Have you no access to an English-language Dictionary there in the Middle Kingdom, Oristar? What about getting it through Hong Kong?

Well, I haven't read the book, nor do I have any desire to, but from the first excerpt you posted, "Though I can't find it" is not even a complete sentence. "And I'm sure I have that old list buried in my papers" which precedes "Though I can't find it", well, you never start a sentence with 'and'. It should have read like this:

"I still have that paperback book, now almost thirty years old, and I'm sure I have that old list somewhere buried in my papers, though I can't find it."

This is not a good example of fine writing, grammatically or rhetorically.

Why cannot you start a sentence with "And"? Do you think Clinton hasn't read the Bible? But he said:"Whether I'm a good man is, of course, for God to judge."
Starting a sentence with "And" is dangerous, but it is not a forbidden fruit. You hate Clinton started a sentence with "And", so you abandon all his work?