Book Review: She Took a Village by Alan Gottlieb
This book review critically examines Alan Gottlieb's She Took a Village: The Unauthorized Biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Merril Press, 1998). The review evaluates Gottlieb's credentials, his central thesis that Hillary Clinton is power-hungry and should be prevented from seeking higher office, and his methodology of linking unrelated events to imply criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons. The reviewer identifies the book as politically motivated conspiracy theorizing rather than credible biography, noting that its central claims — including allegations of murder, drug smuggling, and fraud — remain entirely unsubstantiated and were previously discredited by law enforcement, courts, and the press.
- Overview and Central Thesis: Book's purpose, title origin, and central argument
- Author Background and Political Bias: Gottlieb's credentials, affiliations, and publishing conflicts
- Characterization of the Clintons: How Gottlieb portrays Hillary and Bill Clinton
- Conspiracy Theories and Unsubstantiated Claims: Deaths, unnamed sources, and impossible-to-prove allegations
- The Mena Scandal and Guilt by Implication: Mena airport, drug smuggling claims, and faulty reasoning
- Overall Assessment: Verdict on the book's credibility and value
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What makes this paper effective
- The reviewer maintains a consistently critical but measured tone, identifying logical fallacies in Gottlieb's methodology without resorting to equal-and-opposite rhetoric.
- Direct quotations from the book are used precisely to illustrate specific argumentative failures — for example, the "impossible not to believe" construction — making the critique concrete rather than abstract.
- The review evaluates author credibility by examining Gottlieb's background, affiliations, and publishing arrangements before engaging with the book's content, establishing a sound evaluative framework.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates source credibility analysis, a foundational technique in academic book reviewing. Rather than simply summarizing the book's claims, the reviewer investigates who Gottlieb is, what his qualifications are, and what institutional interests he represents — then uses that analysis to contextualize the book's rhetorical strategies. This approach models how to read a politically motivated text critically and evaluate evidence standards.
Structure breakdown
The review opens by explaining the book's title and purpose, then assesses the author's background and biases. Subsequent paragraphs examine specific argumentative moves Gottlieb makes — guilt by association, unnamed sources, and conspiracy-chain logic — with direct textual evidence. The review concludes with a broad judgment about the book's relationship to established fact, rounding the argument back to the opening premise. The structure moves logically from context to evidence to verdict.
Overview and Central Thesis
Alan Gottlieb's She Took a Village derives its title from Hillary Rodham Clinton's own book It Takes a Village, which argues that the whole community should participate in the raising of a child. For Gottlieb, that idea is itself anathema, and in this book he ostensibly writes a biography of Clinton that is really a rehashing of a great deal of intemperate speculation and contrived scandals about both Clintons. At the time of publication, the Clinton presidency was halfway through its last term, and speculation even then suggested that Hillary Clinton would run for president at some point. This book is largely an effort to forestall such an eventuality by raising all of the supposed scandals surrounding the Clintons, including a variety of unsubstantiated claims about criminal activity, fraud, drug-dealing, and even murder.
These claims remain unsubstantiated throughout the book, though there is a clear assumption on the part of the author that anything said about the Clintons that is negative must be true. The central thesis is that Hillary Rodham Clinton is power-hungry and self-serving, and that she should be stopped from pursuing higher office.
Author Background and Political Bias
Alan Gottlieb is not a historian but a writer whose background is in nuclear engineering and the study of comparative political systems, at least as far as his education is concerned. His writing experience appears to be largely in promoting the outdoors and the right to bear arms. He is a member of the National Rifle Association and a National Director of the American Conservative Union. Based on his book, he decides issues on the basis of his political philosophy rather than on the kind of evidence a journalist would require. This book comes as close to a self-published work as possible while still technically originating from a publishing house, given that Gottlieb is also the head of Merril Press — the very publisher that released this volume.
Characterization of the Clintons
The central characters in this book are Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton. The author sees Bill as affable but weak, while he views Hillary as the real power in the family — a power working through her husband. Gottlieb seems to harbor a particular antipathy toward powerful women, and Hillary's greatest sin in his eyes is that she refuses to remain simply a quiet wife in the background. He also holds a jaundiced view of Arkansas and of anyone who achieves political success in that state, regarding them as necessarily corrupt and venal. In these terms, Gottlieb portrays Hillary as the controlling force of the duo, noting again and again that she handles the finances and that she is able "to maneuver politics to suit her needs and in her shrewd financial sense" (93).
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