Childhood's Rend----illustrated Book Excerpts

ILLUSTRATED EXCERPTS FROM JACK CLIFFORD’S BOOK, CHILDHOOD’S REND: MEMORIES OF THE DOG STAR. Copyright © By Jack Clifford*** (2006). All Rights Reserved. ***Jack Clifford Is A Fellow Arkie And Oxford Classmate and Friend of Bill Clinton, And, Yes, Clinton’s Press-Anointed “Arch-Enemy” and “Nemesis”. Is He Really The Conniving Mastermind Whom Hillary Envisioned At The Very Center Of Her “Vast Right-Wing-Conspiracy”? Or Is He Someone Else? Maybe Someone As Flawed, Wounded, As Bill Clinton Himself? Both Devastated By Two Almost Identical And Horrifying Childhood Rends.

BOOK REVIEWS "From simply scanning the book quite hurriedly, I'd say that it is a weird and zany and whimsical and satirical and sarcastic and farcical and hilarious and poignant and sometimes a heart-rending, gut-clinching mixture of historical fact and hyperbolic literary fiction blended and spiced with semi-autobiographical, pseudoscience fiction, quasi-philosophical, anti-Cristan, pro-Cristan, tangentially genealogical, unquestionably lyrical and even poetical, and sometimes disgustingly political and polemical materials, which, of course, reflects perfectly the weird program that the engineers at Creation Technologies Laboratory, Unlimited have chosen to install into this one." Retep Fisher, Book Critic, The Naveah Chronicle. "I had always wondered what a book written by Wilhelm Falkner after meeting

Jimmy Swiggert at a Star Trek convention would be like. Now I know." Miller Stanley, Book Critic, New Yorke Daily Post. "Compelling and prescient, the book is a riveting, prodigious tour de force of fact and fiction that defies pigeon-holing. Writing as if in a parallel universe, author Jack Clifford vividly and sensitively recalls a poignant and sometimes hilarious montage of unforgettable ragtag "outcasts" and "misfits" from his impoverished childhood in the rural community of Bug Tussle, Arkansa. Yet, the "Bug Tussle" stories are only one aspect of the book. For Bill Clinton afficionadas (and enemies alike) here is a memoir written by the press/mediacrowned "arch-enemy" and "nemesis" of the 42nd president, Clinton's fellow Oxford scholar whom Hillary Clinton envisioned at the center of what she called "the vast right-wing conspiracy". For the first time, Clifford makes public three previously private letters, two to Bill and one to Hillary, that he Fed-Exed to the White House in 1994. While the letters explicitly reject a prophetic label, they are in retrospect prophetic indeed in that they predict impeachment in the absence of what Clifford calls a "fundamental change" by the 42nd president. But was Clifford the center of some vast conspiracy dedicated to bringing down Bill Clinton? You may very well have a different perspective after reading Jack Clifford's riveting book with its perplexingly mysterious and amusingly satirical Da Vinci Code twist about the "endtimes" and "666" and those extremists, on both the right and the left, who fearfully tremble at the devil under every demonized Bush (or Clinton). As Clifford, however, observes, 'Each of us possesses devils, do we not, even if they do not possess us?' Sensitively and thoughtfully, Clifford raises and engages such universal themes as home, faith and doubt, belief and unbelief, despair and hope, forgiveness, grace, time and eternity, and many more. In short, this is a "must read" for those who want to know more about Jack Clifford, now only an insignificant and forgotten footnote in Bill Clinton's history. In this quixotic memoir, Clifford presents his multi-dimensional Self in what he calls "all my unadorned shame and glory" through his recounting of a religiously hypocritical community's treatment of its "outcasts". Throughout the book, Clifford comes across as an intense, sincere, idealistic, transparent, and complexedly multi-faceted person who--like his book---is not easily understood or categorized."

Will Cample, Editor and Book Critic, Los Angels Times. "Belly-laughingly hilarious political satire appertif is sandwiched among and served up with an entre pastiche of poignantly weird, disturbingly universal Dogpatch characters lolling about Bug Tussle, a remote 1950's Arkansas community, where religiosity and hypocrisy compete for the souls of sainted sinners and sinful saints alike. Clifford's Daliesque, quasi-Faulknerian writing style is superbly poetically lyrical at best and opaquely complex and convoluted at worst. A good read." Mitchell Abranoff, Reporter, Newsmonth (formerly with Washington Post-Times).