An exhaustive, soul-searching memoir, Bill Clinton's My Life is a refreshingly candid look at the former president as a son, brother, teacher, father, husband and public figure. Clinton painstakingly outlines the history behind his greatest successes and failures, including his dedication to educational and economic reform, his war against a "vast right-wing operation" determined to destroy him, and the "morally indefensible" acts for which he was nearly impeached. My Life is autobiography as therapy-a personal history written by a man trying to face and banish his private demons. Clinton approaches the story of his youth with gusto, sharing tales of giant watermelons, nine-pound tumours, a charging ram, famous mobsters and jazz musicians and a BB gun standoff. He offers an equally energetic portrait of American history, pop culture and the evolving political landscape, covering the historical events that shaped his early years (namely the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr and JFK) and the events that shaped his presidency (Waco, Bosnia, Somalia). What makes My Life remarkable as a political memoir is how thoroughly it is infused with Clinton's unassuming, charmingly pithy voice: I learned a lot from the stories my uncle, aunts, and grandparents told me: that no one is perfect but most people are good; that people can't be judged only by their worst or weakest moments; that harsh judgments can make hypocrites of us all; that a lot of life is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes the only, response to pain. However, that same voice might tire readers as Clinton applies his penchant for minute details to a distractible laundry list of events, from his youth through the years of his presidency. Not wanting to forget a single detail that might help account for his actions, Clinton overdoes it-do we really need to know the name of his childhood barber? But when Clinton sticks to the meat of his story-recollections about his mother, his abusive stepfather, Hillary, the campaign trail and Kenneth Starr-the veracity of emotion and revelations about "what it is like to be President" make My Life impossible to put down. To Clinton, "politics is a contact sport" and while he claims that My Life is not intended to make excuses or assign blame, it does portray him as a fighter whose strategy is to "take the first hit, then counterpunch as hard as I could". While My Life is primarily a stroll through Clinton's memories, it is also a scathing rebuke-a retaliation against his detractors, including Kenneth Starr, whose "mindless search for scandal" protected the guilty while "persecuting the innocent" and distracted his administration from pressing international matters (including strikes on al Qaeda). [+]

William Booth's extraordinary life saw him starting out as a pawnbroker's clerk and dying having created one of the most successful and characteristic religious movements of the age. His wife Catherine was, in her way, even more remarkable: chronically ill-"throughout her life she was struck down with disease after disease that would have killed a less hardy and indomitable woman"-she nonetheless raised eight children in 10 years and campaigned powerfully for social amelioration. It was in large part because of her campaign against child prostitution that the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16. Roy Hattersley doesn't shrink from criticising Booth, who was "both arrogant and autocratic in his relations with everyone except his wife" but at the same time he is patently enamoured of the sheer energy Booth brought to his sense of mission. It doesn't surprise us that a socialist such as Hattersley is attracted to this dedication: "In an age when even radicals believed that self-help solved all problems", he says, Booth knew that some people were oppressed "by the circumstances in which they were born and lived", a doctrine that "owed more to Marx than to Methodism". But other aspects of Booth's Army seem more New Labour-the fact that he was, in Hattersley's words, "the greatest publicist of his age" or his affable hob-nobbing with the rich and famous ("he was no class warrior, he never used his sermons to denounce the callous rich"). Hattersley's perspective is more focused on these issues of class and his account of the campaigns for social amelioration is absorbing. The underlying religious questions are less thoroughly interrogated, though; it is difficult, for example, to determine Hattersley's attitudes to what amounts to the religious fundamentalism of the Salvation Army's core beliefs. Contemporaries worried that Booth's methods were too "music hall", "intellectually absurd", "theologically indefensible" and-perhaps worst of all in respectable, middle-class Victorian England-"deeply embarrassing. " Like a television Evangelist today, Booth has his problematic side. [+]