The X-President
by Philip Baruth

List Price: $11.95
Our Price: $3.63
You Save: $8.32 (70%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of The X-President

Book Review: Clinton meets Heinlein
Summary: 5 Stars

Bill Clinton is beautifully rendered (in nearly every sense of the term). This richly imagined book also works as a compelling piece of science fiction, a knowing comment on the nature of biography, and a primer on the norms and nuances of bar room billiards.

It is Heinlein without the messianic overtones (or the breast fixation); Primary Colors where anonymity and identity ultimately prove to be fungible; Billy Phelan's Greatest Game for the 21st Century.

Baruth's portrait of Clinton evokes the inexplicable "fullness" of an incomplete man (Wolfe's Charlie Croker) and, at times, the near majesty of the ultimate political animal in command of very considerable powers of persuasion and appeal. The yBC character (Clinton as a boy) is near perfect -- a mixture of promise and promiscuity that just feels right.

Over and over, Baruth nails the details from the shape of Clinton's hands to Carville's nearly freakish power of recall (which is hilariously and ingeniously "explained"). Baruth understands both the people who shape political change and those charged with telling and thereby shaping their stories.

The X-President is an enormously entertaining book that, like one of its central characters, ultimately questions what is is.

Baruth here calls and pockets a difficult bank shot. His readers prove to be the winners.

Literature & Fiction Books

• Books > Subjects
• Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction