Brief summary
Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power
The deeply reported story of two supremely ambitious figures, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—archrivals who became partners for a time, trailblazers who share a common sense of their historic destiny but hold very different beliefs about how to project American power
In Alter Egos, veteran New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler takes us inside the fraught and fascinating relationship between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—a relationship that has framed the nation’s great debates over war and peace for the past eight years.
In the annals of American statecraft, theirs was a most unlikely alliance. Clinton, daughter of an anticommunist father, was raised in the Republican suburbs of Chicago in the aftermath of World War II, nourishing an unshakable belief in the United States as a force for good in distant lands.
Obama, an itinerant child of the 1970s, was raised by a single mother in Indonesia and Hawaii, suspended between worlds and a witness to the less savory side of Uncle Sam’s influence abroad.
Clinton and Obama would later come to embody competing visions of America’s role in the world: his, restrained, inward-looking, painfully aware of limits; hers, hard-edged, pragmatic, unabashedly old-fashioned.
Spanning the arc of Obama’s two terms, Alter Egos goes beyond the speeches and press conferences to the Oval Office huddles and South Lawn strolls, where Obama and Clinton pressed their views.
It follows their evolution from bitter rivals to wary partners, and then to something resembling rivals again, as Clinton defined herself anew and distanced herself from her old boss. In the process, it counters the narrative that, during her years as secretary of state, there was no daylight between them, that the wounds of the 2008 campaign had been entirely healed.
The president and his chief diplomat parted company over some of the biggest issues of the day: how quickly to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; whether to arm the rebels in Syria; how to respond to the upheaval in Egypt; and whether to trust the Russians.
In Landler’s gripping account, we venture inside the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, watch Obama and Clinton work in tandem to salvage a conference on climate change in Copenhagen, and uncover the secret history of their nuclear diplomacy with Iran—a story with a host of fresh disclosures.
With the grand sweep of history and the pointillist detail of an account based on insider access—the book draws on exclusive interviews with more than one hundred senior administration officials, foreign diplomats, and friends of Obama and Clinton—Mark Landler offers the definitive account of a complex, profoundly important relationship.
As Barack Obama prepares to relinquish the presidency, and Hillary Clinton makes perhaps her last bid for it, how both regard American power is a central question of our time.
ISBN:9780812998856
Author:Mark Landler
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A novel by Japanese writer Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Its a Bitter-sweet Japanese style story.
Even though the concept is good but writing could be more interesting, there could be more twists and turns. I couldn’t find writing very appealing. maybe because book is more like a playwright. but its a good read.
Story is kind of old age fantasy time travel not sci-fi. There is underground café in small alley, windowless, in working for more than hundred years. It has 4-5 tables and very few customers. Even though it was famous for providing unique experience to customers.
In this coffee shop we meet four customers, who get to experience time travel. there are four short stories interconnected to each other. “The lover” about confronting lover who left them, “Husband an wife” about receiving letter from husband whos losing his memory,
“The sisters” about sisters want to meet for last time, “Mother and child” about meeting daughter they never got chance to know. Only limited characters and single place, so story is light weight.
There are certain rule to go to the past. There is particular sit in café that takes you to your past, and you have to return to the present before coffee gets cold. both person going to past and person they want to meet should have visited that café before and many more.
The chair which takes you to past is permanently occupied by a women in white dress and the only way to sit on chair, when that women gets up to go to bathroom.
With all the rules for time travel, Its seems pointless to go to past. what if you lose track of time and your coffee got cold. and even if you go back to past, whatever you do, It will not change present.