The Girls in the Van: Covering Hillary

Author: Beth Harpaz
List Price: $24.95
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ISBN: 0312281269
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (12 October, 2001)
Sales Rank: 127,758
Average Customer Rating: 3.61 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
So THAT'S what it is really like!?
From start to finish,I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Although I had followed Hillary Clinton's campaign trail via television bites and newspaper coverage, it is through Beth Harpaz's book that I learned about the missing links -- what it was really like behind-the-scenes and behind the headlines. The author's writing style is smooth and fast paced, yet she manages to fit in an incredible amount of detail, insight and delightful (and often humorous) trivia about this historically significant race for the votes. I also enjoyed Harpaz's honest accounts of her struggle to balance a rough reporter's working schedule with her equally challenging role of mother and wife. As I read each chapter, I felt like I was peeking into the press van's windows and seeing the truly human side of this type of adventure. Highly recommended.

Rating: 5 out of 5
Fun and Insight on the Campaign Trail with Hillary
I had a great time reading this book! Enjoyable from beginning to end! In fact, I read the whole thing pretty much straight through once I started. AP reporter Beth Harpaz conveys her experience of covering Hillary Clinton's campaign through a series of sometimes funny, sometimes touching and always interesting anecdotes about suriving life on the campaign trail with Hillary. She creates a uniformly interesting story without dipping into the typical "kiss and tell", dirty-laundry type fare we see too much of these days. At the same time, however, there are enough revealing bits about the various players in this campaign to satisfy the voyeur in all of us. Somehow, in reading this tale I became fascinated by the job of a political reporter and was intrigued with Harpaz's descriptions as to what constitutes news in a campaign and how that news is created and controlled. And of course, there were the many related stories about how the campaign itself desperately strove to create an image, appeal to constituencies and control the news themselves.

Harpaz also strikingly relays her personal struggles in balancing the demands of the all consuming campaign trail with her even more consuming job as mother of two young boys. And she openly discusses her conflicts about her choices as a professional and as a mother. We all know what that's about! Harpaz also has some interesting thoughts on the role that sexism may or may not have played in press coverage of the campaign and in Hillary's role as a candidate and First Lady.

But "Girls in the Van" is not really a heavy, ponderous book. It's actually alot of fun. I laughed out loud a number of times while reading this book, for instance when reading the lyrics of the naughty songs the reporters on the press van made up about Hillary or while reading Harpaz's account of how the press lost it at a campaign rally where the singing group "10,000 Maniacs" opened the program and Hillary followed by stating how great it was to be there with 10,000 maniacs.

In the end, I really didn't know how Harpaz felt about Hillary, but I also didn't care. I was simply taken with the story. Check this book out. It's a really good read. - (***)

Rating: 2 out of 5
I Wish She Wouldżve Missed It
What was I thinking reading this book? I basically just wanted a humorous and light recount of the race. Do I really care about New York politics, not really, what I am interested in is the detail of Hilary Clinton and her race. What was it like for a First Lady to run for the Senate? What I got was a book that was 1/3 complaining about long work hours, 1/3 complaining about the basics of a campaign and 1/3 complaining about Hilary. This author has every right to write a book as negative as she has about the candidate, but to be fair, I just did not get the level of dislike for Mrs. Clinton from the dust jacket as I did while reading the book. If the dust jacket would have been honist, I never would have bought the book.

To be honist with you I only completed 2/3 of the book, it got to be so repetitious with the whining and complaining that I had to put it down. I do not know if the author thought it was humorous or if this was just a 300 page diatribe about how this author disliked Hilary. If the purpose of the book was to talk about the author's dislike of Hilary then why did she cover just the minor issues she did? Lets be fair, whether they are fair or not, there are a number of bigger issues one could dredge up from the right wing playbook, why focus on repeating speeches on the campaign trail? It just came off as petty. Overall I would not suggest spending the time on this book.

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