The Clinton Years: The Photographs of Robert McNeely

The Chinese government's seizure of half of this book's run (8,00o of 16,000 copies) made major news. The offending shot, of Clinton touching the Dalai Lama's hand while listening to him speak during a meeting, wouldn't normally get a second glance in the U.S., since it is only the P.R.C. that considers the religious leader a dangerous dissident. The rest of the 227 b&w shots presented here, representing the more than half-million frames veteran White House photographer McNeely took while following the president between 1993 and 1998, do a superb job of capturing Clinton's complexities. Artistically, the two most moving shots are of the president bathed in the ethereal glow of candles after lighting one in memory of his recently deceased mother at Kazan Cathedral in Moscow in 1994, and of the president, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and two interpreters--all in stark silhouette--conferring at the Vancouver summit in 1993. Photographs of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton convey them as two temperamentally different poles of a shared dream, and shots of the president and the vice-president, both sharing jokes and in deep discussion, show--as eminent historian Douglas Brinkley (The Unfinished Presidency, etc.) observes in his astute introduction to the history of presidential portraiture and of McNeely's work--what is probably one of the most well-defined first- and second-man teams in U.S. history. (Oct.)