Review: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As someone who has a degree in history and political science, I fully recognize that books like this have limited value. They're written quickly, with little care for accuracy and a lot of reliance on background/anonymous claims, and are often ways for people involved in campaigns to shift blame off of themselves and onto someone else.

With that said, man did this book scratch that schadenfruede itch.

I didn't vote for Trump, but I was very against Clinton as well. This sort of deep dive into what went wrong for Clinton in what should have been a winnable election will certainly be of some value to some people, but a lot of this seems to be an attempt to sort of square the chaos coming from the Clinton campaign with the result. I would have loved to see how this would have read had she won.

As for other criticisms, there is a lot of assumptions of prior knowledge - if you don't know a lot of details about the campaign, you will be lost by some references to bills or situations that do not get a firm explanation. That's a problem for me as a reader, and will be a bigger problem for those who might read this in thirty years fine.

On a whole, though, closer to a 3.5, and more enjoyable for what it stands for than what it is. A better book about the campaign that deals with both sides will come someday, and it will certainly be better.

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