A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country

As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, Clark created a groundswell of excitement with his impressive resume on the national security front and his ability to realign the partisan landscape with regard to defense issues. Yet despite some significant inroads, the Clark campaign remained a work in progress that never fully hit its stride. As narrator of his own memoir and call to action, Clark nicely captures dialogue from the most emotionally charged facets of his life story, especially his heart-wrenching battlefield experiences as both a young officer in Vietnam and a seasoned commander in the Balkans during the '90s. Clark also delivers a spirited retelling of prescient early encounters with such neoconservative stalwarts as Condoleezza Rice and Scooter Libby. When he reads the less autobiographical passages, though, Clark falls into a stilted delivery pattern where sentences lose their natural flow. Clark's inspiring rise to the pinnacle of public service offers built-in appeal for a core audience of political memoir devotees. However, other listeners may not muster the enthusiasm to jump on the bandwagon. Simultaneous release with the Palgrave Macmillan hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 25).