Rating: 
Summary: Ten Minutes From Normal
Review: An inspiring read that gives one an idea what it is like to be in the White House and next to power. The difference is Ms Hughes gives it a much more personal flavor with humorous stories and her personal philosophy. It should be a must read for " Bush Bashers" as at least they can get a first hand understanding of the character of the President rather than base their judgement on spin and often times data that lacks supportive facts. I closed the last page and thought that it was an unsual woman who could balance family, faith, friendship and still survive and be at the top of the players in the jungles of Washington. Additionally, some lagniappe is her faith that weaves through the book and gave me food for thought and the realization that we have some people of excellent character in the White House. It is an easy fun and informative read.
Rating:
Summary: Encouraging!
Review: If you have a conservative bone in your body and would like to find renewed faith in those at the top of our government, please read this book. Even when one takes into consideration Karen's obvious loyalty to George W., this account of her hard work, dedication and priorities based on her faith is very enjoyable. P.S. Those with no conservative bones could also learn a thing or two!
Rating: 
Summary: Karen's Choice
Review: Civilized people can disagree about George Bush, but only his most grudging detractors can deny, especially in the wake of the last election, that the man knows how to sell an agenda. Be it tax cuts, education reform, the war on terrorism, or privatizing social security, the president has evidenced an acute awareness of the power of words to sell his agenda, an ironic intuition from someone so vilified for the verbal gaffes that pepper his speeches. Perhaps overcompensation for his oracular shortcomings led him to cultivate sharp, articulate people like Karen Hughes.
Hughes has had few rivals for George Bush's ear from the moment she joined the staff of his campaign for governor in 1994, following stints as a journalist and Texas Republican party operative. The affinity between the two is easy to see, as Hughes'accounts of some amusing but trenchant exchanges bear witness. "George W. laughed at my exuberance," Hughes recounts in the early days of the first gubernatorial campaign. "'You love everything,' he told me once. 'You love spring, you love fall, you love summer, you love winter, you love the beach, you love the small towns, you love the mountains..'" Coming from an action oriented optimist of the first order, this was high praise indeed. And, as it turned out, a shrewd evaluation of someone who soon turned positive thinking into electoral victories.
Hughes was born an army brat, and recounts her early years with fondness, giving credit to her parents' mixture of affection and discipline for the value system that drives her own ambition. After some peripatetic years which saw the family through stints in Europe, the US and Central America, the Parfitts settled in Texas, and Karen began to fuse an innate passion for
words with a growing interest in conservative ideology.
Her love for language suffuses these memoirs, and seems as genuine as her affection for her erstwhile boss. It's clear that her ability to frame a message with words chosen for economy and eloquence played a crucial role in driving public opinion toward George W., removing the stigma of lightweight attached to his name and draping him with the mantle of neo-conservative visionary. The man we now know as W, number 43, comes to us courtesy of Karen Hughes and Co.
The author herself comes across as a likeable if somewhat exhausting type, energized by conflict and driven by a constant need to set the record straight. She has an acute sense of the rightness and superiority of the policies she and her boss are prescribing for the nation, and she presents them in this book with the same winning assurance that brought her such triumph on the campaign trail. She has faith in few things--God, country, family, and the power of words, not necessarily in that order. She telegraphs the feeling that, with your heart and your words in the right place, there's no mountain that can't be moved.
One has to feel a little for her husband, though her treatment of him here is filled with respectful admiration. A single father and practicing attorney when he met Karen Parfitt, Jerry Hughes already had a failed marriage behind him and a daughter to raise when he met the driven young campaign worker. He probably had no idea exactly what he was in for when they married in the mid 80s, and the success of their union is due in no small part, and by Karen Hughes own admission, to Mr. Hughes' ability to subsume his own needs and interests to that of his spouse.
All this fusion of the political and the personal makes for a great story, and Karen Hughes tells it well, and with characteristic focus and clarity. The irony, then, is that it's her main message, and the theme of her autobiography overall, that's the hardest to buy. According to her well known story herfamily's life,particularly that of her teenage son, suffered immeasurable upheaval by the move to DC to join Bush's administration in 2001. All through the early days of legislative acitivism and the horrors of 9/11, she maintains, her family suffered in silence because of her need to discharge her duty to the President and the nation. At some point, the conflict became untenable, and she made the only choice that a wife and mother with conservative values could possibly make. She gave it up, pulled up stakes, and moved home to Texas for the sake of her son.
But wait a minute. Hughes herself was an army brat, who managed to deal with the separations and disruptions that result from following a parents' career. To her credit she never once evinces bitterness about these experiences, and even embraces them as stimulating and formative. Why shouldn't she expect the same thing from her own son? After all, she wasn't moving the family to take a promotion to product manager for Colgate in Cleveland. She was working for the President of the United States, and was offering her child a once in a lifetime experience to live and learn at the highest level of American society. Couldn't he deal with e-mailing his friends in Texas while he attended a posh private school in an exciting city and watched his mother make history? Even after all Karen Hughes' tortured explications for her decision, this reader still came away skeptical that this was the whole story.
But regardless of one's read on her motivations, Karen Hughes' story is a timely and resonant one in modern American life. She emerges as a post-feminist archetype, rejecting any kind of self-definition through victimhood. Now that her son is a big boy of 18, it remains to be seen what inevitable, meaniningful role she'll carve out for herself next from the sharp rocks of American political life.
Rating: 
Summary: Over Achiever At the Top
Review: Remember the over-achiever in school who asked a lot of dumb questions but thought she was so profound? Well she is here. What's scary is that she is working for the Pres. advising him on what to say and do so he can appeal to the rest of us. Issues don't matter and cricism is baseless. The President and his annointed adviser are on the side of right by dint of their pure hearts, God knows. This is scary stuff. Is the President so insecure that he needs a cheerleader like this at his side? Would he have stopped reading My Pet Goat if Karen had only gone with him on that trip to Fla. It's not what you know that gets you to the top; vapid and selfrightous spin does.
Rating:
Summary: Got Ipecac?
Review: Sometimes the most damning portrait of another's character can only come inadvertently through the intended praise of a loyal friend. Such is the case for George W. Bush and Company through Karen Hughes' self-satisfied memoir of her tenure as Bush advisor and propaganda czar. In these roles, Hughes has presided as den mother over a president and an administration of ideological group think, whose level of arrogance is matched only by its ineptitude, and whose messianic delusions of grandeur fall somewhere between those of Caligula and Jethro Bodean. Through it all Hughes has indefatigably sought to spin, obfuscate and sanitize all that has been callous, fool-hearty, and underhanded in this administration. When the blunders and the misdeeds have been too egregious and blatant to ignore, Hughes has dared others to question lest they be exposed as unpatriotic and betrayers of the faith.
Behind this gross-out memoir of gooey sentimentality and jingoism lies a ruthlessness that has no regard for fact or truth and would not hesitate unraveling the intestines of a puppy to advance its Bush agenda. Living among ideologues like Hughes who uncritically act upon deluded visions of divine reward, be it in the form of 70 virgins or a heavenly Texas where the streets are paved with gold and the trailers are rhinestone studded, is deeply troubling to those of us simply trying to get along with each other in a world that is shrinking in space and resources. Living ten minutes from normal is not close enough.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Read
Review: A great behind the scenes look at the 2000 ekection and President Bush.
Rating:
Summary: Great Election Time Read!
Review: This book far exceeded my expectations. I loved the insight to the political process and George Bush's thoughts. A must read for this fall!
Rating:
Summary: Watch what she does ...
Review: I sat next to Karen Hughes at a breakfast during the time she was working on this book, and gave her an old Lauren Bacall autobiography I had just finished, insisting that she not trouble herself with returning it to me. She did, of course. I liked her at the time, and her book only reinforces the impression. She is a very forthright and intense person, yet in a very winningly feminine way. She is also a deeply religious person, and not shy about letting you know it from time to time, but to my mind she strikes just the right balance.She deals with several topics of wide interest here. She began as a reporter and migrated to politics, as the communications chief for George W. Bush, so the interface between government and the press is a constant theme. The whole book is also a study in women in politics, not only because of Hughes herself but because Condoleeza Rice is her good friend and probably appears more often than anyone outside Hughes's family or Bush himself. (I am thinking of the ways in which Rice and Hughes actually influence our nation's governance throughout this story, and also the issue, for Hughes, of balancing family life with an all-consuming job-not just a women's issue of course.) The style and personality of the president is another overriding theme. There are two other themes that are important but not so continual: the 2000 presidential campaign and the events after 9/11. I mention all of this because I think the cover might narrow one's expectations: "Karen Hughes, Counselor to the President, Wife and Mother. The Woman who left the White House to put family first, and moved back home to Texas." Yes, the family is key, but there is so much more. I might add that her government ranking was equivalent to that of a three-star general. She is no lightweight. Here's a nugget on the hard core side: "Ironically, the reluctance of nations such as France and Germany to join us in challenging Saddam probably emboldened him [Bush] and made war more likely, not less." More personally, she lofts a great quote from Martin Luther King: "Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve." This is not high literature, and doesn't pretend to be, but it's an important book for anyone who would like to understand a little bit of the background of our times and see a more personal side of the current administration.
Rating: 
Summary: I like Karen Hughes, but this book falls short.
Review: Karen Hughes is a role model for a lot of women trying to balance career and family. She is a genuinely good person, and this book just exudes pleasantness. I would recommend it highly for women. I think she had women in mind when writing it. She was speaking to them. So, as a man, it was not my favorite book, but it had some very admirable points. I think it gives a great insider perspective and insight into some moments of recent importance in American history, including the 2000 campaign, the Florida recounts, and September 11, 2001. I like Karen Hughes, but I found some of her more autobiographical passages from growing up to be somewhat boring. I could have done without those, personally. Some people will definitely enjoy them, however. I do give her points for her candid discussion of her faith. It takes courage as a national public figure to go on record like that. While this book didn't quite win me over, the world definitely needs more people like Karen Hughes.
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