Review: Hillary Clinton’s new memoir Something Lost, Something Gained comes against a familiar political backdrop | Canada Voices

• Title: Something Lost, Something Gained
• Author: Hillary Rodham Clinton
• Genre: Nonfiction
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Pages: 336

Hillary Clinton wrote her new memoir, Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty, this past spring and early summer, against a political backdrop that felt very déja vu. At the time, it became obvious that former United States president Donald Trump would once again be the Republican nominee for the 2024 election.

In the book, Clinton confesses that the blow of losing to Trump in 2016 still pains her. “Since 2016, people have asked me, ‘Will you ever be able to move on?’ Move on?” she writes. “I wish. History has its hold on me … I live with it everyday. And every day I make an effort to turn my eyes to the future instead.”

The years since the 2016 election have been ones of challenge and change for Clinton. “I’ve kept busy supporting candidates and causes who represent my values, speaking out against threats to women and democracy.” The 76-year-old has found new ways to pursue politics: She’s currently a professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. “Everyone has to find their own approach to aging, but for me, remaining in the fight is who I am and who I’ll always be.”

Books we’re reading and loving this week: Globe staffers and readers share their book picks

Although there are a number of somewhat grating “I wish I wasn’t right” and “I told you so” moments in the book, Clinton’s tenacity is admirable. While many Americans – Republicans certainly, but even many Democrats – wish that Clinton would fade into the political ethers, she is determined to use her influence for good. She recounts using her leverage as former secretary of state to rally world leaders to help in the evacuation of Afghan women amid President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. She writes of being given a two-page “kill list” list of the women that the Taliban would target as they took back power. “[It] was chilling to read,” she says. “125 names – Afghan women I knew and admired – Afghan women likely to be targeted by the Taliban after the last of the American troops left.”

These women hadn’t worked directly for the U.S. government but they were women who had been doing everything they could to transform Afghan society: They were starting schools and businesses, for example. Some were journalists; others had worked in the Afghan government. While the priority was to get those who worked for and with the U.S. army and government out, Clinton was determined not to leave these women behind.

Her team pulled together information: contacts, and those who had passports, for instance. They worked it out with the Defense Department that the women they were helping to evacuate would be identified by a white scarf that they would put on their purse, or around their neck, or on their coat, so that they could be efficiently identified by the U.S. military at the gates of the airport.

Clinton co-ordinated with other governments – including our own – who would take people out on their planes for example and land safely in their country. “I called the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to ask if he would also accept some of our women and families,” she writes. “It was not clear that they would have permanent residency in the United States – assuming they could make it there in the first place – and that meant they might be at risk of being deported back to Afghanistan. Trudeau was supportive and agreed to accept as many as a thousand women and family members on refugee visas.”

The timing of the book’s release, a mere month and half before Election Day, surely isn’t a coincidence. Who better to remind us that high momentum and even the popular vote doesn’t translate to winning the White House? “While it pains me that I couldn’t break that highest, hardest glass ceiling, I’m proud that my two presidential campaigns paved the way for women like [Kamala] Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren to run,” she writes. “I still believe we will have a woman president one day. I hope it’s sooner than many expect.”

Because the book was submitted before Biden dropped out of the race and Harris took over as the Democratic nominee, her words hold more significance.

Critics of Clinton might dismiss the book as a thinly veiled attempt to insert herself back into the political discourse. Clinton herself wouldn’t care. “Once, I wasted energy worrying what critics might say or how the media would respond; now I have an easier time brushing all that aside and just doing what feels right and important,” she writes. “Time and so many battles won and lost have given me a thicker skin and a stiffer spine.”