HILLARY CLINTON: The Inside Story By Judith Warner (Signet, $63) AFTER 18 months on the presidential campaign trail, it is hard to imagine that there could be anything left to write about Hillary Clinton, the new First Lady of the United States. As Judith Warner demonstrates in this biography, released to coincide withBill Clinton's presidential inauguration, in factual terms there isn't.
Hillary is revealed, as documented ad nauseam in the media, as the bright young thing who dreamed of being an astronaut and instead became the First Lady. After NASA rejected her application to join the space programme (made at age 14) on the grounds ofher sex, she graduated cum laude from her Illinois high school, Wellesley College and Yale Law School and married a boy from the South whom everyone thinks is not as smart as she is.
Fortunately, Ms Warner has chosen to look deeper and examine the effect of Hillary, referred to in the introduction as ''the most important woman in the world'', on the US.
She argues that the partnership of Bill Clinton, a struggling Southerner and a democrat, and middle-class, Methodist-reared, Mid-Western over-achiever Hillary is now seen as the ultimate in successful post-war pairings with both people accepted as havinga role to play.
But she also highlights how Hillary, in her quest for success, has made compromises that many women would not be prepared to make.
Hillary Rodham Clinton was the eldest in the family of two boys and a girl, who spent her childhood and teenage years in four-bedroomed two-storey comfort in Park Ridge, a satellite town of urban Chicago.
Her father Hugh was the classic Republican small businessman who had gone to college on a sports scholarship and then set up his own textile business. Her mother, was the perfect 50s housewife. Dorothy Rodham stayed at home with Hillary and her two younger brothers Hugh Jr and Tony but she was no ordinary mum.