J.W. McCormack at The Baffler:
LOOK, THERE’S NO HARD-AND-FAST RULE that mandates books by world leaders need to be tree-murdering, anti-democratic power fantasies farmed out to struggling ghostwriters by self-obsessed corporate shills concerned with driving up the price of speaking engagements. Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli authored more than two-dozen romantic novels and biographical works. Jimmy Carter scribbled a bizarre Revolutionary War novel. And Winston Churchill won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature for his four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (which isn’t a recommendation so much as it is serviceable bar trivia). But former President Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s new thriller The President Is Missing is not a novel crafted by a benevolent liege or an ex-president in peaceable solitude. It isn’t really anything by anybody. Just as every truly beautiful novel elaborates the terms of its own composition, so too every piece-of-shit literary fart-fest proffers the petard with which to be hoisted for the convenience of critics.
more here.