Yes, there are a few hundred words on Chelsea's 2010 wedding (Clinton wore an "MOTB" necklace – Mother Of The Bride Bill and Chelsea danced to The Way You Look Tonight), but you'll have to wade through 40 pages on modern Asian diplomacy to get there. For the rest of us, the book's structure is an early red flag: chapters organized by country, a nearly 200-page section on upheaval in the Middle East. For political junkies seeking an insider baseball-ish look at the State Department, Hard Choices is probably too simplistic (to her credit, Clinton lays out her very complicated job in terms any reader can understand). What Hard Choices is is a detailed account of how and where Clinton spent her four years as Secretary of State: 112 countries (many more than once), nearly one million air miles and more meetings, briefings and surprisingly banal back-channel phone calls than you can recount in a book – though she certainly tries. If this is a beach read, then so is Brothers Karamazov. This is particularly surprising since, prior to its release, the buzz surrounding Hard Choices was the it might be the summer's biggest beach read. (Diane Sawyer didn't let zero mentions of Monika Lewinsky in the book stop her from asking about the world's most famous intern during the book tour.) Reading Hard Choices is a bit like arriving at a highly-anticipated dinner party and finding out that your host wants to show three hours of vacation slides – we wanted the woman, we got the wonk. The fact that Clinton herself has very little in common with the tabloid-friendly narratives that surround her doesn't stop readers from wanting dirty details. The question of what readers expected from this memoir is complicated by the fact that Clinton is not only a politician, but a public, even pop cultural, figure – someone who we have known, or at least we feel we have known, personally as well as politically. First, take note that, for Clinton, the hardest choice of all seems to have been what to include in the book – a 600-plus-page paperweight that is largely an exhaustive political record and far too occasionally a revealing self-portrait or page turner. Hillary Clinton says she called her new memoir Hard Choices because it's a title that best captures her experiences "on the high wire of international diplomacy" and also "what it will take to secure American leadership in the 21st century." And yes, that second part sounds a lot like the beginnings of a campaign mantra, but we'll handle that particular hard choice (one that gets only a couple of paragraphs in Hard Choices) when we come to it.
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