LOVE her or hate her, one would be hard put to not have an opinion about Hillary Clinton. Ambitious, intelligent, and opinionated, Mrs Clinton is also arguably one of the most polarising figures in US politics in the last 10 years.

Since coming into the political limelight with her husband in the 1990s, Mrs Clinton has incited strong and ambivalent feelings that no American First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt (who she admires and models herself after), has ever elicited. Yet, no First Lady has entered the White House with the kind of presumption and, some would say, arrogance she showed in attempting to recast her role into co-president, as when she brazenly took on (and failed in) the mammoth task of reforming the healthcare system in the first two years of the Clinton presidency.

Mrs Clinton's inscrutable personality, her enigmatic marriage, and questionable choices, most famously in her decision to 'stand by her man' even as she had earlier derided women who chose to stay home and 'bake cookies' along with the hapless country singer Tammy Wynette, continues to mystify and enthrall us.

This ensures a sustained level of interest and appetite for books that attempt to shed light on the 'real Hillary', particularly as she stands to make history again if she returns to the White House as the next president.

As one half of the Pulitzer Prize-winning duo that broke the Watergate scandal, Carl Bernstein's contribution to the growing body of Hillary books should have been a worthy addition.

Drawing on interviews with 200 friends, enemies, family and colleagues, Bernstein's A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton is an exhaustive (and sometimes overwrought) portrait of Mrs Clinton's life spanning her middle-class upbringing in a Chicago household headed by a domineering father to her reincarnation as Senator Clinton.

Bernstein strikes a measured tone in assessing the woman who continues to divide opinions. He admires her drive and ambition, and even appears to believe her deep sense of purpose and her professed faith and ideals. Yet, he is also unstinting in his criticism of her hubris and apportions much blame of the Clinton presidency's missteps on her.

Bernstein writes: 'With the notable exception of her husband's libidinous carelessness, the most egregious errors, strategic and tactical, of the Bill Clinton presidency, particularly in its infancy, were traceable to Hillary - not just her botched handling of their healthcare agenda. The inept staffing of the White House, the disastrous serial search for an attorney-general, the Travel Office fiasco, the Whitewater land deal, the so-called scandal over her commodities trading, the alienation of key senators and congressmen - all this can be traced in large measure to Hillary.'

The book covers every detail of Mrs Clinton's formative years, her political awakening at university, marriage to Bill and life in Arkansas and Washington.

Yet, much of this is old ground that has already been widely written about, not least by the subject herself in her autobiography Living History published in 2003. Readers looking for new revelations and more titillating details of Bill's indiscretions will be disappointed.

Bernstein does go some way to explain how Mrs Clinton's faith shapes her into the almost paradoxical feminist Methodist. Yet, the author's failure to access her directly is glaring and leaves some of his insights sounding hollow.

As if to compensate for this, some of Bernstein's insights sound frivolous as when he attempts to highlight Mrs Clinton's 'developing perfectionism' and supposed vulnerability with men by recounting her senior 'prom crisis'.

After wading through 536 pages, the final chapter, A Woman in Charge, on Mrs Clinton's post-White House career as senator and presidential hopeful - is disappointingly short and shallow. We learn little about her accomplishments as senator, and even less about her disastrous decision to support the Iraq invasion.

Contrary to the title of this chapter and book, we are left none the wiser as to whether candidate Clinton can truly be a woman in charge of the most powerful country in the world.

A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton
By Carl Bernstein / Hutchinson
$46.60 w/wo GST, 628 pages
Rating: C