Rating: 
Summary: Tedious
Review: The first 50 pages manages to capture Bill Clinton's combination of sincerity and self-aggrandizing perfectly but once the Gennifer Flowers character enters the scene the book dies a slow lingering death. No longer is the book about politics. Instead it's about the world of the campaign worker that has to suffer with every headline. That might make compelling drama in the hands of a better writer but Joe Klein merely makes the entire thing an exercise in tedium. As the book moves along from scandal to scandal the reader is left with the feeling of reading National Enquirer instead of something serious. While other journalists praised the book for being so true to the campaign, this is the kind of bloodless book that a journalist would write. There's not one compelling character. Every character speaks in soundbites and none of them are very interesting. Most of them wear out their welcome by the second page they appear on. Even worse is the decision to make the main character black. While Klein manages to say some cool things about race relations in the aforementioned first fifty pages, he's then stuck with writing a black character that can't shut up about being black - yet sounding WASPish. That wouldn't be so bad if a jive-talking standin for Jesse Jackson didn't come in and turn the entire book into a minstral show for about 4-5 pages. In that moment you can tell that Joe Klein is just as cautious about race as the narrator accuses other white people of being - mostly because Joe Klein is very obviously a White Guy trying to write Black and failing miserably. Besides those obvious flaws there are also the boring subplots including the second infidelity of the "Jack Stanton" character and the romance between the narrator and another campaign aid. A romance that is about as believable as the Jesse Jackson character. I'm not even sure which character is supposed to be Carville. Doesn't matter because nowhere is Carville's personality taken into account. If this book teaches you anything it should be to avoid books that are compared favorably to All the King's Men - another atrociously self-indulgent exercise that loses the main character's personality in the self-conscious narrative.
Rating: 
Summary: Politics has never been this interesting
Review: The only reason I first read this book was to see how different it was from the movie that I had enjoyed. What I found after I finished it was a very enjoyable account of a Presidential Campaign.
The story about the campaign of southern governor Jack Stanton is told threw the eyes of Henry Burton, a grandson of a famous black minister similar to Martin Luthur King Jr. and the son of a white woman. Initially he does not want to be in the campaign but after seeing Jack give a speech to an adult learning class, he is in. He spends the rest of the book working on the campaign trying to make sure that Jack still has a chance after some of the stuff that they throw at Jack (women, drugs, arrest record)
During the campaign, he meets Libby Holden a gay women who was friends with Jack and his wife Susan for many years. They become friends when they help Jack out by going down to Florida to find out more information about one of the Democratic nominees for President. Libby is only one of the funny, enjoyable characters that help out with the campaign some others being Richard Jemmings and Daisy whom Henry has campaign sex with.
The book can being a little boring in parts, but overall it is a very good read. I would recommend it to anybody who likes politics or anybody who wants to know a little more about how campaigns work.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Story, Thank Goodness It Is Fiction
Review: This terrific tale of a sleazy politician is extremely entertaining, and we must be eternally grateful that it's only fiction. Can you imagine the self-values which voters would have to compromise, to support a sleezy candidate like this in real life? They would have to totally flush their morals down the toilet -- they would have to actively condoning lying, adultery and worse, in backing the sort of dreck this man portrayed. That's why fiction is such a wonderful medium. This author created a magnificent fantasy world wherein a cheap little self-interested political hack elevated himself into major election competition. We can be relieved that both major political parties are too honorable for either to ever put forward, and stick by, a candidate of this poor quality (along with his clinging, Evita-like wife, who acts blind to all of his disgusting behavior). "Primary Colors" is an entertaining romp through a made-up, empty male character's putrid story, and we should be relieved with every breath we take that nothing this disgusting could ever occur in the real world.
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