Who better to understand William Jefferson Clinton, America’s first rock and roll president, than someone who’s done many of the same things Clinton has? Former Rolling Stone writer Joe Eszterhas, who also has written the screenplays for some of Hollywood’s biggest box office hits, including Basic Instinct, Sliver, Betrayed, F.I.S.T., Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Hearts of Fire, and Music Box (and has had his share of Hollywood actresses in the process), became addicted to the Clinton impeachment saga and has ended up writing an incredibly readable and illuminating book on Clinton, Eszterhas, and many other people, perhaps including us.

During what sounds like the kind of mid–life crisis many of us would kill to have — fears that our public persona as a screenwriter overwhelm our creative life — Eszterhas moved his wife and three kids from Malibu to Maui and took time to reflect on "values and success … the sixties … my past relationship with the women I’d used and my present relationship with the wife I adored. Somehow or other, those thoughts about my life inevitably led me to Bill Clinton."

"I thought I recognized and knew Bill Clinton and what made him tick. I understood the ambition, the success, the political duplicity, the Hollywood charm. I understood the mad priapic obsession that had always fuel-driven his life … because it had driven mine until I met Naomi [Eszterhas’ second wife]. I understood the fierce boom-box rhythms of his inner life the same way I understood and loved the demons shrieking in the darkness inside the Stones, the Doors, the artist now known again as Prince, and Dr. Dre."

And so Eszterhas started reading everything he could find about Clinton and also got sucked into full-time watching of the impeachment hearings. "I watched every mini-second of it, bleary-eyed, haggard, and grizzled, maniacally flicking channels, indulging gluttonously in the national bacchanal of information and bulimia of rumor. I read everything, I saw everything, digested whatever I could, and learned a lot … about myself and Bill Clinton and about America, the country I love as only an immigrant who grew up in the ethnic ghettos of Cleveland can love her."

The result is American Rhapsody, a book that takes us on a tour of the minds (and other parts) of many of our best known political and Hollywood figures, with a guide who has lived much of their life and can tell us about it unflinchingly.

This is also the book in which Eszterhas confesses that for many years he has had a "writing partner," an alter ego with a very different writing style and take on life, even than Eszterhas’. When he published a class newspaper in the sixth grade, he says, he wrote "childish investigative reports about the river in the city below the school," while his writing partner "wrote sensational exposés about which girls in class were kissing which boys."

Eszterhas takes credit for some of his screenplays, giving "the twisted little man inside me," blame for the others. And in American Rhapsody he has allowed his partner free rein to contribute a number of "hallucinations" about Ken Starr’s secret lust; about George W. Bush and Tricia Nixon; about Hillary and her forlorn, intimate relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt; about Al Gore’s heartbreaking, cuckolded fears; about Bob Dole and his inelectable missing shoulder; about "John Wayne" McCain’s painful broken promise and his love of identical Long Tall Sallies; about Monica and her spoiled princess extortion of the president of the United States; and about Bill Clinton and his eternal true love, his Willard.

What makes those portions of the book so fascinating is that they are so believable, even though Eszterhas says for the record that they are not true, but instead are the wet-dream projections of his dark side.

Eszterhas and the rest of the people at Rolling Stone were thrilled when Bill Clinton was elected president because he was one of them, America’s first rock and roll president, someone who had dodged the draft, smoked joints, done cocaine, had numerous sexual encounters, and was "Mick on cheeseburgers and milk shakes, Taco Bell, and Chef Boyardee spaghetti." Rolling Stone called Clinton’s inauguration "the coming of a new age in American politics."

What Eszterhas has learned, however, that he and many of his Sixties friends have grown up. And they don’t want leaders who haven’t. He recognizes the hurt he has caused by the way he lived his life, and now knows that he doesn’t want his kids to have the sexual and drug experiences that he had.

His previous life has given him particular insight into Bill Clinton and his Willard (so named because it’s longer than Willie). And the story he tells is at once fascinating, hilarious, and oh, so very sad. Most book reviews use quotes from a book as a way to entice people to read it. That simply won’t work here. Each page has its share of quotable lines that cause tears of laughter or sorrow in the reader, but to share any of them would not do justice to the others and would diminish the overall impact of the book.