Decision Points (Bush) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
There is something very modern, almost New Agey, and endearingly insecure, about the tone and posture the son adopts in Decision Points. Even as he's bombing Baghdad back to the Stone Age, he s very much in touch with his feelings. In college, he says, he was appalled to learn how the French Revolution betrayed its ideals.
Michael Kinsley - New York Times


Of the postwar presidents who lived long enough to assemble their autobiographies, not a single one produced a book of any real merit. It's not so much that they're bad books as that they're dull ones, reducing flesh-and-blood presidents—all of them interesting men, no matter how one may feel about them politically or ideologically—to cardboard figures representing Virtue in various forms, described in prose that for the most part appears to have been put together by committee, or a computer on autopilot. Decision Points is no exception. It's competent, readable and flat. The voice in which it is written is occasionally recognizable as that of George W. Bush—informal, homespun, jokey—but more often it's the voice of a state paper, impersonal and dutiful.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post


The book contains delightful and telling personal observations. Hank Paulson's family was so Democratic that his mother cried when he joined the Bush cabinet. After Mr. Bush refuses to pardon Scooter Libby, convicted of obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame affair, Vice President Dick Cheney tells him: "I can't believe you're going to leave a soldier on the battlefield." When Gen. Pete Pace is removed as Joint Chiefs chairman in a bonfire of political correctness, Mr. Bush says that Gen. Pace took off his four stars and left them at the Vietnam Memorial near the name of a Marine in his old platoon. In contrast to the ugly cartoon figure drawn by his opponents, Mr. Bush is unfailingly gracious to virtually all his opponents, including Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist who had lost a son in Iraq.
Daniel Henniger - Wall Street Journal


As former President George W. Bush—barely two years out of office—points out in the acknowledgement of his memoir, Decision Points, virtually every member of his extended, very political family has published a bestseller, including his parents' dogs. Where does Bush's account of his astonishingly eventful eight years rank in such company? Probably far higher than many of his detractors expected. As Bush writes..., he enjoys surprising those who underestimate him.
Tim Rutten - Los Angeles Times


After eight years in the White House, George W. Bush has written a memoir that offers up a staunch defense to the critics who questioned his domestic and foreign policies.... The book reads at a steady pace with a conversational voice. Bush offers behind-the-scenes views from the Oval Office as well as his discussions with and the input from others in his successes and failures on policy and events during his two terms in office.... [He] offers few major surprises, other than contemplation of replacing Vice President Dick Cheney as a running mate in 2004.... Unlike other presidential memoirs, Bush touches on just a few personal milestones before his years in the White House.
Gary Martin - San Antonio Express


Here is a prediction: Decision Pointswill not endure. Its prose aims for tough-minded simplicity but keeps landing on simpleminded sententiousness. Though Bush credits no collaborator, his memoirs read as if they were written by an admiring sidekick who is familiar with every story Bush ever told but never got to know the President well enough to convey his inner life. Very few of its four hundred and ninety-three pages are not self-serving.
The New Yorker


Bush, smartly dividing the book into themes rather than telling the story chronologically, offers readers a genuine (and highly readable) look at his thought processes as he made huge decisions that will affect the nation and the world for decades. Many will ridicule his thinking and bemoan those decisions, but being George Bush, he won’t really care. —Ilene Cooper
Bookist


In a page-turner structured around important decisions in his life and presidency, Bush surprises with a lucid, heartfelt look back. Despite expected defenses of past decisions, Bush is candid and unafraid to say when he thinks he was wrong. Critics on both the left and right are challenged to walk in his shoes, and may come away with a new view of the former president—or at least an appreciation of the hard and often ambiguous choices he was forced to make. Aside from the opening chapter about his decision to quit drinking, the book is not chronologically ordered. Bush mixes topics as needed to tell a larger story than a simple history of his administration. Certain themes dominate the narrative: the all-encompassing importance of 9/11 to the bulk of his presidency, and how it shaped and shadowed almost everything he did; the importance of his faith, which is echoed in every chapter and which comes through in an unassuming manner; the often unseen advisor whom the president conferred with and confided in on almost every subject—his wife, Laura Bush; and the wide array of people who helped him rise to the White House and then often hindered him once he was there. The book is worthwhile for many reasons. Even if many readers may not agree with his views on the subjects, Bush's memories of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and other major events are riveting and of historical value on their own. Additionally, Bush provides insight into the daily life of the president. The author accepts blame for a number of mistakes and misjudgments, while also standing up for decisions he felt were right. Honest, of course, but also surprisingly approachable and engaging.
Kirkus Reviews