By Dennis Ray

In 2010, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin released Game Change about the 2008 elections, covering both parties and their primaries up through the general election. In 2013 they followed it up with Double Down about the 2012 election, focusing again on both political parties and their strategies to win.

I enjoyed both books evenly finding each to be informative and entertaining. What worked was that they never felt political, never felt agenda led, never seemed to be partisan.
I was disappointed when listening to an interview with Halperin that there would be no book on the 2016 election. If ever there was a story to be found about a political year. This had to be it.

This January I learned about an upcoming book called Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. It was coming out in the spring of 2017 and I knew this book was the on I had to have, and a sure must read. The story of Hillary Clinton’s doomed campaign.

And it turned out to be even better than I had hoped.

It begins in 2015 when Clinton announces her presidential campaign and preseeds through the election and the aftermath on November 9th. Of course, the outcome we know so this book wasn’t about suspense but about strategies as well as an understanding of why she failed. It is sharply written and well documented without any political agenda. This doesn’t mean it’s not about Clinton as a person, which it is, and it shows her to be at times a difficult person as well as sympathetic.

The authors used hours of interviews with the campaign team as well as countless articles and news feeds from the two years leading up to the election.

The book never delves into the Trump campaign, choosing only to cover what the news media had revealed or from what the Clinton campaign had the knowledge to attain.

The audiobook is a swift 17 hours and read by Kimberly Farr.

To order this book visit www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com