MixedThe Washington PostThe Hillary Clinton of this bitter memoir resembles the shrunken, beaten Richard Nixon who told David Frost that he gave his enemies a sword and 'they twisted it with relish.' Again and again she blames herself for losing, apologizing for her 'dumb' email management, for giving paid speeches to banks, for saying she’d put coal miners 'out of business.' She veers between regret and righteous anger, sometimes in the same paragraph ... What Happened is a raw and bracing book, a guide to our political arena ... The caterwauling about Clinton’s loss basically takes two forms — whether one event or gaffe could have reversed the election, and whether another candidate would have let the election even get close. Clinton is convincing on the first point, citing Trump’s own strategists about how the election was lost before the Comey letter. She is all over the map on the second.
Bernie Sanders
PanThe Washington Post...deadpan, wistful and wonkish ... Reading it as a reporter who covered Sanders closely, I felt like a sitcom character who gets beaned on the head and hallucinates an angel — or a talking dog, or a 75-year-old senator from Vermont — spinning lessons about what really matters in life ... Anyone picking up Our Revolution to learn what the Sanders campaign was like will get some impassive memories and not much else ... the rest of Our Revolution [is] an extended information dump that supplements Sanders’s old stump speech with a tree-slaughtering army of charts. Any reader who was not already a fan of Scandinavian welfare systems will become one.
