Monica's Story - livre d'occasion

Imagine that you are twenty-four years old and have been confiding in one of your closest friends about your on-again, off-again relationship with a married man twice your age. Then imagine your name is Monica Lewinsky, the man's name is Bill Clinton, and your friend's name is Linda Tripp--who has secretly tape-recorded your confidences and passed the tapes along to Kenneth Starr. Suddenly you find yourself surrounded by government agents who threaten you with twenty-seven years in jail if you do not tell them every detail of your private life and cooperate fully in their investigation of the President.

In the summer of 1995, Monica Lewinsky, then twenty-one years old and fresh out of college, went to work as an unpaid intern at the White House. What happened next, as a vivacious young woman's "crush" on her boss led to her public humiliation and the impeachment of the President of the United States, has been documented in shocking detail.

But have we heard the true story? Betrayed by Linda Tripp, Monica found herself a pawn in the power struggle between President Clinton and the Office of the Independent Counsel. As she waited to face the grand jury investigating the President, the media conducted its own trial of Monica, while her legal predicament prevented her from telling the world what really happened.

Monica's Story at last sets the record straight. Drawing on his exclusive conversations with Monica, her family, and her friends, bestselling biographer Andrew Morton paints a complex and compelling portrait of a generous-hearted but troubled young woman whose dreams of romance had unimaginable consequences.

Monica was compelled to answer the grand jury's questions, but it was to Andrew Morton that she unfolded the whole story of her experiences before, during, and after the White House scandal. The result is a candid, intimate biography of a young woman whose life holds some surprising secrets--and whose public image is very different from the private truths revealed in these pages., Though it's a legal document, the Starr Report, published in late 1998, reads like a racy novel about the most powerful man in the world, President Bill Clinton, and a young intern, Monica Lewinsky, who's portrayed as a spoiled Beverly Hills brat performing oral sex on the president while he talked to colleagues on the telephone.

Andrew Morton, the author of Diana: Her True Story, spent several months interviewing Lewinsky after the scandal broke; the result is Monica's Story, which asserts that the picture the Starr Report paints of Lewinsky is totally incorrect. Morton believes she and the president had an emotional, mutually satisfying relationship, which, if circumstances had been different, would probably have remained secret. Although he covers much of the same territory as the Starr Report, he adds details of conversations Lewinsky and Clinton had in an attempt to show the depth of the relationship. In chapters with titles like "Grunge, Granola, and Andy" and "Terror in Room 1012," he paints a portrait of a "child-woman" who is sexually liberated but also intelligent, loving, and well mannered. "[She] could be anybody's sister," he insists, "anybody's daughter."

The book is most interesting, however, in its descriptions of the political intrigue, lies, and deception resulting from Kenneth Starr's investigation. Leading the evil band is Linda Tripp, described as a black-hearted, shameless manipulator who betrayed Lewinsky and spurred the scandal for her own personal gain (she was planning to write a book about Clinton). He also examines the media's hatred for Lewinsky--particularly that of women writers who became obsessed with her weight and body shape. "Just as the O.J. Simpson trial exposed the racial fault line running through American society," he argues, "so the Monica Lewinsky saga has spotlighted the underlying misogyny that still permeates American life." Monica's Story is gripping stuff--porn, fantasy, farce, political commentary, and tragedy all rolled into one. --Dale Kneen, Amazon.co.uk