Personal History by Katharine Graham is not only a comprehensive view of her life, but also a surprisingly readable and quick paced story of what it was like to be a powerful woman in business during a time when women didn't have those roles and an interesting window into the lives of some very important political figures.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1998, so you know it has lots of well written insights into Katharine Graham as a person and as a political figure. Great. For some people that is enough, but if you aren't super interested in that, why would you read this fairly long book? For me, memoirs give a lot of insight into what it was like to live in other times without it being all about facts and dates. This book also gives you what it was like to know JFK and a bunch of other powerful people. If that isn't enough, she talks about her husband's mental illness in a way that is so real. You can see how she became his caretaker when he was in the down part of his manic depression, and how she made excuses for him. I feel like this part of the book could be a guide titled "How to tell if your mentally ill partner is taking over your life".

Perhaps you can already tell that I don't think Katharine Graham was some kind of paragon of what all women should aspire to be. There are so many moments when she is bemoaning her ignorance on one subject or another when I wanted to scream, "You are super rich! Hire a tutor!!!" However, at the same time, you have to wonder why it never seemed to occur to her that if she felt she was lacking in some important area (like the ability to give speeches), she never did anything about it but muddle through. That, I think, is one of the - perhaps, unintentional - themes of the book. You have this clearly intelligent and educated woman who is so convinced that she can never be as good as her smarmy (to me) ex-husband or totally self-centered mother that she literally spends her whole life apologizing for herself, while still achieving a lot (in part thanks to all those $$$, but also thanks to a lot of work). That's what reality is like, though.

Another thing that really struck me was how much she attributed to luck that wasn't actually luck. I mean, she was lucky that she came from a rich family, but was it really luck that her father, the first head of the World Bank and one of the presidents of the Federal Reserve, made some good financial decisions that made things easier for her later? How many of us attribute things to luck that were in reality due to choices (good or bad) in the past?

The comments above are mainly on the subject matter. As for how the book was written, I think it was really well done. You definitely feel like you know these people. Probably Katharine Graham has a biased view, but don't we all? The setting too is really fleshed out. I have distinct memories of the her description of when the presses were trashed by the union printers or what the old Post building was like. The plot? Well, it is just the story of her life. There is definitely some repetition, which I think is normal for big, fat books that may be used more for reference than just read all the way through, I think that she sets up a pretty clear view of where she came from and how she got to where she did by the end.

Who should read this book? I think if you are at all interested in history, famous people, or memoirs, you would enjoy this book. It is detailed enough that maybe if you enjoy psychoanalyzing people, you also would have fun with this book. While it does read pretty quickly, it isn't short, so this isn't a celebrity memoir that you can read in an afternoon. Also, there is almost nothing about her romantic life, besides her husband. I mean, she kind of indicated at the end that she had dated, but almost none of that is covered in the book, so don't look here for a steamy tell-all.

Even if you don't read this book, watch All The President's Men, which will make Watergate much more real for you. I have yet to read the book, so that is on my list. As much as I'd like to read The Pentagon Papers, I don't think I ever will, as I get the impression that it is much less exciting and more like reading reports than the book about Watergate. Also, and only tangentially related, if you are interested in Vietnam, check out A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan. It is also nonfiction and just so great.