Review of 'What Happened (Really) to Hillary Rodham Clinton - The Actual Evidence Supporting Her 34 Reasons for Losing the 2016 Election' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Hillary Clinton sounds like she went through a year-long mourning process following her political loss in 2016. It's much faster than my mourning process would have been had I failed at such a huge goal, and it's definitely faster than the mourning process of my boyfriend, who is a registered Democrat and voted for her. But because she is a machine, and everything must have structure and purpose, this book is her process's inevitable output: a volume which tries to make sense from her loss and make salves for the wounds of her tribe.
She humbly thanks her supporters, talks a bit about her own post-loss self-care protocol and encourages others to have their own, reminds us that setbacks aren't terminal and that progress isn't always a linear program, points out new and old problems, identifies incremental steps towards improving them, and asks us to persist.
My biggest takeaway from her thoughts is that being grateful, and coming away from a bad experience with something learned, is a choice -- just as wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. We have to reflect and attempt to process our experiences objectively in order to grow that way. Oddly, listening to her self-reflective process is fruitful for my own free-associative creative process.
Hillary Clinton has synthesized the data and extracted its wisdom with maximum efficiency. She is upgraded and ready to meet the challenges of a Trump-led government, recharging her base and calling for inter-party compatibility protocols consisting of human decency and mutual respect. No matter what you think of Hillary, she has transformed "Abort, Retry, Fail" into "Resist, Insist, Persist, Enlist."