What Happened

In the audio edition of her 2016 presidential campaign retrospective, Clinton sounds like Clinton: a strong, tough, smart, experienced woman. She’s a little wobbly-voiced in the introduction, deeply concerned that people won’t want to hear what happened, “especially from me,” she states. But she quickly finds her clear, collected tone and rhythm, sounding slightly more relaxed and conversional than she usually is in speeches and interviews. She is emotionally composed even when describing her fury at Trump, at FBI director James Comey, at Senator Bernie Sanders, at the media. At one point in the book, she even says, “I wear my composure like a suit of armor—for better or for worse.” Thus the drama is not so much in her reading as in the descriptions of her intellectual and emotional responses to events such as when Comey reopened the investigation into her email days before the election, the instant she learned she lost the election, or Trump’s inauguration. The one jarring aspect of the audio is her long pronunciation of the indefinite article a, constantly interrupting the flow of her normal speech. It’s Clinton’s most personal book yet; hearing it read in her own voice further reminds listeners of the person behind the politician. A Simon & Schuster hardcover. (Sept.)