SOURCE: Drew, Elizabeth. “Humpty-Dumpty.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (9 May 1999): 3–4.

In the following excerpt, Drew offers a positive assessment of No One Left to Lie To.

I

On a cold, wet day in mid-March of this year, President William Jefferson Clinton tried to rekindle the myth of “the man from Hope.” Only a couple of hundred people turned out for the dedication of Clinton's childhood home in the small town in southwest Arkansas. His family wasn't with him. (The home was called his birthplace but, actually, Clinton was born in a hospital.) The propaganda film shown at the 1992 Democratic Convention notwithstanding, it wasn't long into Clinton's presidency before we came to understand that Clinton was more Hot Springs than Hope (where he had lived only until he was four).

Hot Springs was racy, a gambling town, a place where people (including Clinton's mother) lived fast and took chances...