Rating: 
Summary: a failed Secretary of State
Review: This woman is a total idiot. Remember North Korea? I wouldn't let her negotiate a second hand shoe bargain for me in a flea market.
Rating:
Summary: Traitor in France
Review: As long as she's criticizing our government in France, maybe she should consider permanent work over there digging for truffles. A shameless, self-delusional biography but not surprising considering who her boss was. Oink oink.
Rating: 
Summary: A Far-Ranging Autobiography --- Readers Will Learn Much
Review: In winding up her far-ranging autobiography, Madeleine Albright tells us with amusement that once, after leaving office as U.S. Secretary of State, she was mistaken in public for Margaret Thatcher.It's worth a chuckle to the reader --- but there are indeed interesting similarities between the two women, even though their political leanings are light-years apart. They both reached the highest rank ever attained by a woman in their respective democratic governments, were fiercely partisan political figures, and held very strong opinions and were never afraid to battle for them (Albright's favorite expression for this is that she never hesitated to "push back" at those who opposed her). Albright is best known for serving as U.S. ambassador to the UN in the first Clinton term, and as Secretary of State in the second. Readers of this book will learn in detail about the early years and long political apprenticeship that led up to those two high-profile jobs. They will also learn, in perhaps more detail than they care to absorb, about the many foreign policy crises in which she was a major player under Clinton. The other thing about Albright that most people will recall is that only after she became Secretary of State did she learn that her family ancestry was Jewish --- that three of her grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps. This personal revelation is duly covered but not dwelled upon in extraordinary detail. Her life, though unsettled due to wartime exigencies, was not a rags-to-riches tale. She was born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague into a comfortably situated family. Her father was a respected Czech diplomat and college professor. Fleeing the Nazis, the family spent time in England during World War II. They arrived in the United States when she was 11, and her father took a teaching job in Denver. She entered Wellesley College in 1955 and became an American citizen two years later. She married into a wealthy and well-connected American family in 1959. Her first political idol and mentor was Edmund Muskie, in whose doomed presidential campaign she took part. After the breakup of her marriage, her career in government and politics took off during the Carter presidency, her only personal setback being a painful divorce in 1983. This is all dispatched in the first 100 pages or so of her lengthy book. The rest of it details her UN and State Department years with a thoroughness that seems at times compulsive. All the heroes and villains of those years pass in review --- Carter, Havel, Milosevic, Helms, Clinton, Putin, Arafat, Barak. The complexities of Rwanda, Serbia, Kosovo, the Middle East, Somalia and other trouble spots are laid out in prose that can get ponderous --- but her incisive personal portraits of these people lighten the mood. Albright makes no pretense to real objectivity. She is a committed Democrat who admired both Carter and Clinton, and she defends them against all the charges that have been flung at them by their opponents. She defends such controversial actions as Clinton's successful ousting of Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the UN, and his policy of opening up trade with China and warily seeking a somewhat civil relationship with North Korea. Her two biggest regrets are the failure of the UN to stop genocide in Rwanda and Clinton's failure to forge a solid peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (in that regard, while gently critical of Israel on occasion, she holds Arafat mainly responsible for the breakdown). The two biggest villains in her cast of characters, not surprisingly, are Arafat and Milosevic. There is naturally a strong feminist slant to her narrative. There is also a vein of sharp observation, character analysis, and even humor. The writing, when not bogged down in the minutiae of crisis management, can be bright, though we are left to wonder how much of the credit is hers and how much belongs to her collaborator, Bill Woodward. Mercifully, Monica Lewinsky remains a bit player in Albright's narrative. Two other things, perhaps more important, are also missing: detailed assessments of the effect of the 9/11 tragedy on America's global course and the George W. Bush administration. Those would have made an already long book longer, but one wishes she had covered them anyway. --- Reviewed by Robert Finn
Rating: 
Summary: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LAPTOPS?
Review: I was amazed that Ms Albright wrote this book with obvious pride and markets it so heavily. One would have thought that her failed administration would quietly slink away and hope not to be questioned about her public performance. Will she never stop her shameless self promotion and constant whining about the current president? If only she had courage, conviction and imagination she could perhaps have saved America from the terrible attacks of 911. If only she could have apologized for the selling of State secrets to foreign governments........if only she could account for the lost or stolen laptops from her own office. I fear she was too busy defending her boss and playing the aging courtier. The book is an insult to all Americans and a transparent attempt to vindicate a pathetic performance as Secretary of State.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent read
Review: I usually pick up books like this with excellent intentions and then rarely finish them. Not with this book! It is a fascinating and well written book. Particularly for those of us who don't spend all our time reading densely written academic speak.
Rating:
Summary: MADELEINE ALBRIGHT'S MEMIOR BETTER THAN MARGET THATCHER'S
Review: MEMIORS Look at the subject then read on. Most of the reviews on Madeleine were negative, but personally think the book is really good. Madeleine's memior is was much more candid then Margaret's memiors which more textbook. Both had twins, Madeleine had 2 girls that look the same, Margaret had boy and girl. Madeleine had a divorce and Margaret didn't. I could go on forever, but I stop here. I hope Madeleine comes to my town's book store to sign her book for the customers. Thank you.
Rating:
Summary: Good, Not Great, Travelogue, not Strategic Dialog
Review:
This is a diplomatic companion to Hillary Clinton's lightweight personal story. Madame Secretary will never be confused with Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. It merits comment that Hillary appears to have had a great deal to do with Albright getting the job. If you want a read that covers the years superficially, and glosses over a great deal of what actually did or did not transpire, this is the book for you. If you want serious reading about international relations, or grand strategy, or how to deal with the twenty big problems facing the world, see the other books I have reviewed for Amazon, including Joe Nye, Kissinger, Boren et al, Jonathan Schell, Shultz et al, E.O. Wilson, J. F. Rischard, and so on. Half the book is about the personal path to power, the other half is about very narrow slices of what the Clinton Administration chose to focus on--an administration where foreign policy and national security were largely on automatic pilot and very much in a back seat compared to domestic matters. Most troubling to me is the chapter on terrorism, chapter 22, titled "A Special Kind of Evil." In exactly 17 pages (.03 of 512 text pages), Albright manages to gloss over the fact that she deliberately and repeatedly sided with Sandy Burger in constantly suppressing intelligence that warned suicidal terrorism was on the rise, and took a back seat--or no seat--on the subject of devising a national grand strategy for counter-terrorism. She is proudest of getting $1 billion for turning our Embassies into bunkers, something 9-11 demonstrated to be inconsequential. She says "The response by the Clinton administration to the Africa embassy bombings and other attacks on our watch resulted in the apprehension of many terrorist suspects and established a strong precedent for international cooperation in fighting terror." This is absolute and utter baloney. The reality is that neither the CIA nor the FBI or any foreign governments were actually put on a war footing, because the Clinton's did not want to dim the lights and bear down. I find it quite noteworthy that "intelligence" does not appear in the index as a term. This is a book about travel and personal meetings, which is how Clinton's national security team spent its time. We have gone from that extreme to the other, of neo-conservatives who never served in uniform throwing military force around unilaterally and indiscriminately. The next president must find a middle ground, an informed middle ground where intelligence, strategy, policy and spending ("it's not policy until it's in the budget") are fully integrated, and America is able to devise a sustainable, strong, smart foreign policy that includes a robust homeland defense with homeland counterintelligence, a massive peace force, a considerable global constabulary force, and a big war force sufficient for two major regional conflicts at once. We cannot cut the national security budget by one penny, but by golly, we can do a *lot" better than either the passive Clintonians or the psychopathic Bushies.
Rating: 
Summary: Better and More Candid Than I Expected
Review: Madeline Albright's "Madam Secretary" is a candid, fair account of the Clinton team's successes and failures. It never goes too deep into any one subject, but if read with Strobe Talbot's "The Russia Hand", and James Steinberg's "The Age of Sacred Terror," one can get a pretty good sense of what it was like on the inside of the Clinton foreign policy shop during the mid to late-90's, amongst a team that seemed for the most part to actually get along with each other, unlike the present. She admits that the administration took too long to engage in the Balkans, while pointing out that Colin Powell didn't want to engage the military there. She is candid about how the diplomatic avenues pursued at the UN during that effort almost failed, and points out the limitations and problems with the UN itself. Albright demonstrates great restraint in not pointing out the hypocrises and roadblocks put up by the GOP in the late 90's, and she instead affirms the differences of opinion that existed both inside and to some degree outside the administration on each issue as it came up. And given the revisionist history practiced by many members of the current administration regarding the war on terror in the late 90's, she clearly takes the opportunity to point out what the administration did, countering the "It's all Clinton's fault" mantra from the conservative media and book authors of the last three years. Her account may be biased because she was on the inside, but it is no less credible, and is in fact more so than those who were on the outside then throwing rocks now.
Rating:
Summary: a must read
Review: Madam Secretary does a good job explaining how she balanced her career with her personal life. It's truly an inspirational story (especially for women). If you are all about the Clinton era, you MUST read it.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Time
Review: Don't waste your time. The only thing this book is good for is a sleeping aid. 30 seconds and you're out for the night.
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