Rutten on My Life

The L.A. Times' Tim Rutten steps away from his media column for the day to review the Bill Clinton memoir and finds it a bit thin for a 957-page effort.

The result is much like the public man, fascinating but ultimately unsatisfying. There are flashes of incisive brilliance and numbing stretches of tedious self-absorption.

The book's structure is serviceable, if uninspired, the product perhaps of an oncoming deadline. About half the book is devoted to his childhood, education and early political career, the second to his term in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, vast, arid stretches of the latter read as if the former president simply sat with his office diaries and filled in everything he could remember about a particular day...

Still a relatively young man, Clinton has lived a life filled with significant and dramatic events. Yet his thoughts on it are curiously shallow, products of that inner paradox that has rendered so much of the boomer's inner life impersonal and self-absorbed at the same time.

It's in the Calendar Live portion of the Times' site, thus only available to subscribers or for a fee. Meanwhile, the Times' Doyle McManus, ex-staffer Robin Wright and the late Mark Fineman have won the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence from the National Press Club.

Previously on L.A. Observed: Friday traffic alert, Michiko and Bill