Hillary Clinton book extracts reveal doubt over Bowe Bergdahl talks --- It may start with a heartwarming tale of reconciliation over chardonnay with Barack Obama, but former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's long-awaited memoir has left Washington pondering a carefully cultivated sense of her distance from the president that will only strengthen rumours of a second attempt at the White House. -- Though not officially due for release until Tuesday, a copy of Hard Choices obtained by CBS revealed Clinton's misgivings about past US negotiations with the Taliban over captured prisoner Bowe Bergdahl. News of such feelings comes just as the political backlash over Obama's controversial deal last weekend reaches its peak. -- “Opening the door to negotiations with the Taliban would be hard to swallow for many Americans after so many years of war,” Clinton writes, in passages recounting her time as secretary of state that appear to confirm her rumoured unease about Obama's more recent conclusion of talks. -- On Syria, another foreign policy hotspot over which Obama has been criticised by Republicans for failing to intervene, Clinton is blunter still in signalling that she would have done things differently. -- “The president's inclination was to stay the present course and not take the significant further step of arming rebels,” she writes, according to CBS. “No one likes to lose a debate … in this case, my position didn't prevail." -- The limited extracts made public so far make it hard to judge how much the book is about settling old scores and how much it is about preparing a campaign message, but they suggest a careful media strategy very much in keeping with Clinton's reputation for tight control of the message. -- Potentially the most damaging chapter, detailing her handling of the September 2012 attack on US consular buildings in Benghazi, was leaked to Politico last week with a series of rebuttals aimed at drawing the sting from recent Republican attacks. -- Another chapter, in which she discusses her childhood and the birth of her daughter, Chelsea, was published by Vogue on Mother's Day. -- CBS, which says it stumbled across its advance copy in a bookstore, happens to own the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster. -- Other parts of the book also appear aimed at softening Clinton's reputation in the eyes of the electorate. -- “I sometimes dug the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other, it was the only way I knew how to cope with the crazy schedule and fierce jet lag,” Clinton writes about her diplomatic travels, according to CBS. --- But in the absence of any direct hint about about future ambitions – “Will I run for president in 2016? The answer is I haven't decided yet,” she reportedly writes on page 595 – it is the sections detailing her interaction with Obama that are likely to generate most interest when the book is published next week. - More, Dan Roberts in Washington, Guardian,