Five reasons Hillary Clinton’s new book is worth reading—and three reasons it’s worth critiquing

1. Vulnerability matters

Hillary Rodham Clinton admits that she’s known for being careful with her words and guarded with her emotions, and there is a sense in this book that she’s finally letting it all out. “In the past,” she writes, “I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting down my guard.” But Clinton isn’t manifesting a sudden conversion to honesty in this book, as some reviewers have suggested. She’s modeling vulnerability.

That’s important for two reasons. First, when we see our most famous politicians as human—rather than as abstract power-filled entities who we either put on a pedestal or assign to the deliciously imagined hell we think they deserve—we’re more likely to realize that we too have some agency in politics. Second, it’s hard to work against a culture that idolizes bravado, domination, and ego without living into the theological truth that there’s power in weakness.