Not Again ...

After careers as a media figure, journalist, businesswoman, mother, and charity executive, Chelsea Clinton has decided now that she is also an author ... and the establishment that adores her and her parents continues to act as enablers.

If the above offends you, allow me to apologize in advance for indelicacy, but Chelsea's easy stroll through careers in which talented others have struggled to advance has always irked me and does so even more with each step. She may be very clever and even very appealing (though I have yet to be presented with any serious evidence of either), but apparently she is not a talented writer.

"Where she succeeds is in making even the knottiest issues seem accessible to a bright seventh grader," New York Times reviewer Maria Russo starts in a hopeful fashion. "In fact, she writes in a style that would seem perfectly at home in a stack of middle-school term papers. ('In my lifetime, a number of countries across the world granted women the right to vote for the first time. Having the right to vote is often only a first step. Being able to safely exercise that right is often harder, even dangerous for some women ... and men alike. In many countries where women are denied a meaningful right to vote, men are too. To be clear, that shared inequality and lack of rights is nothing to celebrate.') There are abundant references to what she has already told us, or will tell us later, a tic teachers seem to love, but alas, no one else." And there we have the damnation by faint praise.

So, aside from the name "Clinton," how has she come to deserve the opportunity to lecture the youth of America for 400 pages? (And seriously, Four. Hundred. Pages. What young person is going to read this? And couldn't their time be more valuably spent reading, I don't know, any well established author on poverty and economics? Surely Steinbeck and Ellison are still in print. Hell, make a run at the other sections The New York Times; there you'll find real journalists who actually know how to write like grown ups.)

So, the review concludes, what is this massive doorstop for? "On the evidence of 'It’s Your World,' Clinton feels a lot for other people. [Oh Dear God] But it mainly seems as if she feels sorry for them, and that’s ultimately where 'It’s Your World' reaches its limits. This is not a book destined to influence hearts and minds in the way 'I Am Malala' [A book by a young woman who has actually done something] has done — by helping children to understand the slow way change can happen and to truly feel a part of that magic."

I wonder what identity she'll be offered an easy, effort-free pathway to next ...