Also this issue: Puh-leeze Don't Squeeze the Artwork! Polly Apfelbaum’s work is a tactile wonderland. -Robin Rice Artsbeat -Debra Auspitz Denyce Graves -David Shengold Hands Across Veronica -Debra Auspitz Eric Schlosser -A.D. Amorosi "Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America 1730-1860," -Kristina Weise There's Something About Mary -David Anthony Fox These Mortal Coils Norman Rush details a marriage from the inside out. -Justin Bauer

June 19-25, 2003

artpicks

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Living History

by Lori Hill

There's a Forrest Gump quality to Hillary Rodham Clinton's new memoir, Living History (Simon & Schuster). Not in a bumbling-but-goodhearted-soul kind of way (that's more like Bill), but rather her ubiquitous presence at historical moments. Like her or not, she's lived through some of the most tumultuous times in American history. And she's as literate and lively a storyteller as any. In elementary school, she knocked on doors on the South Side of Chicago trying to uncover voter fraud under the first Mayor Daley. In high school, she heard Dr. Martin Luther King speak. In college (as her Republicanism waned), she went to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention. Controversy found her for the first time in her Wellesley commencement address, as TV shows and Life magazine pursued her. She worked for Marian Wright Edelman while at Yale Law School (she later assisted Edelman in the launch of the Children's Defense Fund). Then she met William Jefferson Clinton. But that's beside the point. She sat on a research committee working toward Nixon's impeachment. The list goes on. It's impressive, but it's all told with a wry sense of humor. Clinton is self-deprecating about her appearance ("Thus began my lifelong hair troubles." "My friend led me around town like a Seeing Eye dog.") and about her and Bill's baby boomer sensibility ("I had to admit that my husband and I were caught up in a generational cliché, a milestone in life that only members of our self-conscious age group would define as a syndrome.") Sure, the Monica Melee is well documented. It's over quickly, though, and after all the jokes have been made and the invectives hurled, hers is just a simple life story.

Hillary Rodham Clinton signs Living History, Mon., June 23, 1 p.m., Borders, Broad and Chestnut sts., 215-568-7400.