There are at least two good reasons to read Bill Clinton's imaginatively titled new memoir, "My Life." For one thing, you're probably in it somewhere. Everybody else is, from Hank Aaron to Gennady Zyuganov to the guy designing dioramas for Clinton's presidential library.

Another reason to read "My Life" is that it's a genuinely good and useful book.

Mr. Clinton's book is a double flop: Either stake your claim to join the guys on Mount Rushmore or embrace your destiny as a guy who rushes to mount more. The president does neither and winds up with a book that reads like the world's biggest Rolodex punctuated by self-doubt.

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.

Like its author, Bill Clinton's autobiography My Life is a big, sprawling jumble. Parts of it, as a waspish television commentator observed, read like a press-cutting book, or one of those school magazines in which everyone in the class has to be mentioned.