Given all the sobering things that have happened since the turn of the millennium — from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the war in Iraq to the Bush administration’s efforts to expand executive power and curtail civil liberties — the sex and real estate follies of the Clinton White House now feel as if they belong to an era long ago and far, far away. Indeed, Carl Bernstein’s new biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton often feels like a very long, very slow acid flashback to the 1990s, rehashing and reexamining, in minute detail, matters like Monica, Whitewater, bimbo eruptions and the state of the Clintons’ marriage.

Mr. Bernstein has written a serious, energetically researched and largely fluent book, but there is little new in this volume: its disclosures amount mainly to embroiderings on already well-known aspects of the Clintons’ lives.