Brian Brooks and I lined up in Harlem the other night for a moment with Bill Clinton at the former President's booksigning for his memoir, "My Life." I advocated voter registration at future signings, while Brian shared words with Clinton about the new film, "The Hunting of the President." "Its a good movie," Clinton told Brian." Like Clinton's 950-some page book, the new film looks takes a close look at the right-wing attempts to undermine the former president, from Whitewater through the Lewinsky affair and more.

While I still have more than 900 pages to go in the Clinton book, "The New York Times" has weighed in with conflicting takes on the memoir.

Michiko Kakutani wrote in Sunday's paper:

"The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull — the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history. In many ways, the book is a mirror of Mr. Clinton's presidency: lack of discipline leading to squandered opportunities; high expectations, undermined by self-indulgence and scattered concentration.

In the paper's official book review yesterday, Larry McMurtry countered:

William Jefferson Clinton's "My Life" is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not.

[Outside the Hue-Man bookstore in Harlem on Tuesday, a woman sells "Uptown Bill" dolls. photo © eugene hernandez]