Rating: 
Summary: Thank goodness...
Review: ... Ms. Gerhart wisely decided not to dwell on the First Lady's unfortunate 1963 manslaughter conviction as it would have ruined the tone of this very upbeat book. Needlessly dwelling on how Laura plowed through a stop sign doing 55 mph, and collided with another vehicle which, oddly, was being driven by her boyfriend (who was killed in the crash), would only detract from this excellent book's profile of the greatest First Lady ever!Instead, I'm sure that you'll all be glad to know that Ms. Gerhart focused on how Mrs. Bush's faith (in God and the Criminal Justice System) have helped her be a tower of strength for her tough-on-crime husband as he battled with overcoming substance abuse. Yes, maybe to some she'll always be known as the woman who got away with murder, but when the twins stumble in at four am they call her "Mom". God Bless The Bushes! And God Bless Darryl Worley!
Rating:
Summary: The Perfect Doormat
Review: A very good book. It shows the ideal Republican wife. Pretty, polite, a lady, quaint, obeys her husband blindly in all things, keeps her mouth shut, cooks, cleans, raises the children, and above all, knows her place. Laura Bush is the perfect Republican wife. She has so much in common with the oppressed Muslim women in the Taliban it is frightening. Oh, sure Laura Bush, like some women in Islamic fascist countries have degrees, good paying jobs, but the at the end of the day they know they are second class citizens and their husbands call the shots. This book relates that perfectly. Laura Bush is the perfect wife and the perfect doormat. She is the ideal mate to a corrupt, evil man like George Dumbya Bush. A man who stole the election and was never elected president. A man almost as every bit as evil, horrible, racist, and horrible as Saddam and Osama. Thankfully this arrogant, ignorant, evil man who can barely string two sentences together will be out of office soon. The book itself is pretty dang good I must say. And it is an even handed story about Mrs. Dumbya Bush. She's a doormat and proud. Like Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush before her. Cheers Ms. Gerhart! To hear these rabid right wing Nazi types foaming at the mouth at how much they hate this book is the funniest thing ever!
Rating: 
Summary: Ann (Spearheart)!
Review: Ann Gerhart has shown her true color - yellow! She allowed for the cover a beautiful and tender picture of President and Mrs. Bush because she was afraid without such a cover, the book wouldn't sell! The cover misleads! In between the cover is only scathing and negative writing! Obviously, she has snuckered us all into buying a book that we thought would give us unbiased, honest information about the First Lady of The United States. Wrong! She thinks we are all stupid and that we won't pick up on her inuendos, distortions, and outright inflammatory statements! She just as well could have written an instructional image marketing book - "An Attempt to Destroy someone by lethal words!" Ms. Spearheart even stooped so low as to attack the Bush twins and compare them unfavorably with Chelsea Clinton. This book will anger you!
Rating:
Summary: "The Play-Doh first lady" (a quote)
Review: Ann Gerhart has written a remarkably disparaging book about Laura Bush, a lady of integrity and courtesy. Gerhard is at once comical and irritating as she cloaks her thinly veiled arrogance with admitted inability to understand such composure. This book reveals Gerhard's patronizing attitude toward her subject with whom she avows fascination beginning "when I heard that she wiped her shelves down with Clorox to relax and organized her extensive literary collection according to the Dewey decimal system."
Rating: 
Summary: harrowingly powerful
Review: Ann Gerhart neatly demystifies the Bush clan in this book. The ironies in the title are wonderful: Gerhart neatly demonstrates that Laura Bush really is "the perfect wife" for this president. She traces the alcoholism that runs through the family -- most horrifically in the tale of Laura Bush's drunken, deadly assault with a motor vehicle on her high-school boyfriend (she killed him -- by some reports, running him over several times) and her subsequent acquittal. (The records have now been sealed, but it is easy to read through the lines in Gerhart's account.) All in all, it is a tale to rank with that of the Borgias.
Rating:
Summary: An uneven effort redeemed by good reporting
Review: Ann Gerhart set the bar for herself very, very high by titling this book "The Perfect Wife." After reading this book twice, I feel that a better moniker would have been "An Almost-Perfect Life." Deft reporting redeems much of the book's unevenness: It's as fine a book as might be expected, given the extended Bush clan's passion for spin control. Penetrating the facade of the Bush family's interactions would try the patience of a skilled Kremlinologist. One gets the impression that Gerhart just got worn out and wrapped things up in fewer than 200 pages. This is especially unusual brevity for a biographical subject that the author actually has covered, met, and interviewed, as Gerhart has for The Washington Post. The few factual errors are quite surprising, given their on-the-recordness: for example, Barbara Bush Sr. is not a "Smith graduate," as Gerhart avers, having dropped out to marry, and Mrs. Bush Sr.'s surviving daughter is identified as "Doro[thy] Koch Bush." Gerhart begins with a trip to Midland, Texas, yielding a finely nuanced report of life in the '50s and '60s for affluent white kids like Laura Welch, a sheltered and adored only child. Her status in town did a great deal to protect her from the uglier consequences of killing a classmate, the town's golden boy, Mike Douglas, in a traffic accident when both were seventeen. (Laura's driver license was not even suspended.) Has this tragedy been the "turning point" in Laura's life that some claim it to be? If so, Laura herself changes the subject rapidly whenever it is raised. Gerhart also does a fine job summarizing and filling out previously known data (about Laura and George W.'s whirlwind courtship, for instance). There's disappointingly little new information to share with readers, though it's nice to learn about Mrs. Bush's band of lifelong friends, and the fact that Laura voted for McCarthy in 1968. Even in face-to-face reported conversation with Gerhart, this undeniably smart woman comes off as surprisingly inarticulate and repetitive--probably due to her unceasing efforts at self-protection. However, there are other facts (not opinions, facts) about the Bush family--including Laura on an intimate level--that a Google search can find in seconds. The author makes much of the issue that both Mr. and Mrs. Welch and Laura and George W. had looked into adopting children from what Gerhart calls "the Gladney home" in Fort Worth. (George and Laura abandoned this quest when she became pregnant with twins.) That's a poignant story. However, The Gladney Center is a well-known donor to Bush candidacies, and George W.'s brother Marvin and his wife Margaret, who speaks frequently as an adoption advocate, adopted two children from Gladney. There's a salient connection, missed in this book. As an avid reader, I was keen to find out what Laura Bush actually reads during all those stints on the couch with a surreptitious cigarette. However, what Laura claims to read might have been concocted by a focus group--The Bible, Zora Neale Huston, "The Willie Mays Story." It was an endearingly personal touch to learn that Laura had chosen mystery writers Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter Carol as the two females, among five writers, to lead a literary conference. The section of this book that has drawn the most attention is Gerhart's depressing retelling of the antics of the sullen Bush twins. Their mother has publicly commented upon their actions (including multiple arrests) by saying, even after the girls turned 21, "They just want to do what other teenagers do." Gerhart implies that since the twins' gestation and birth was difficult, their mother has always viewed them as little miracles regardless of the tackiness of their actions. Apart from reporting on the poshness of the travel and accommodations of various Bush family gatherings--Kennebunkport, The White House, the Vice-President's Mansion, various governors' mansions--Gerhart tells very little about Laura Bush's interactions with her in-laws, except for her formidable mother-in-law. Marvin, Neil, Jeb, and Doro are scarcely mentioned, though the index contains twelve lengthy references under "Bush family, politics as business of." Four stars to Ann Gerhart for doing as good a job as she has, under the circumstances.
Rating:
Summary: An uneven effort redeemed by good reporting
Review: Ann Gerhart set the bar for herself very, very high by titling this book "The Perfect Wife." After reading this book twice, I feel that a better moniker would have been "An Almost-Perfect Life." Deft reporting redeems much of the book's unevenness: It's as fine a book as might be expected, given the extended Bush clan's passion for spin control. Penetrating the facade of the Bush family's interactions would try the patience of a skilled Kremlinologist. One gets the impression that Gerhart just got worn out and wrapped things up in fewer than 200 pages. This is especially unusual brevity for a biographical subject that the author actually has covered, met, and interviewed, as Gerhart has for The Washington Post. The few factual errors are quite surprising, given their on-the-recordness: for example, Barbara Bush Sr. is not a "Smith graduate," as Gerhart avers, having dropped out to marry, and Mrs. Bush Sr.'s surviving daughter is identified as "Doro[thy] Koch Bush." Gerhart begins with a trip to Midland, Texas, yielding a finely nuanced report of life in the '50s and '60s for affluent white kids like Laura Welch, a sheltered and adored only child. Her status in town did a great deal to protect her from the uglier consequences of killing a classmate, the town's golden boy, Mike Douglas, in a traffic accident when both were seventeen. (Laura's driver license was not even suspended.) Has this tragedy been the "turning point" in Laura's life that some claim it to be? If so, Laura herself changes the subject rapidly whenever it is raised. Gerhart also does a fine job summarizing and filling out previously known data (about Laura and George W.'s whirlwind courtship, for instance). There's disappointingly little new information to share with readers, though it's nice to learn about Mrs. Bush's band of lifelong friends, and the fact that Laura voted for McCarthy in 1968. Even in face-to-face reported conversation with Gerhart, this undeniably smart woman comes off as surprisingly inarticulate and repetitive--probably due to her unceasing efforts at self-protection. However, there are other facts (not opinions, facts) about the Bush family--including Laura on an intimate level--that a Google search can find in seconds. The author makes much of the issue that both Mr. and Mrs. Welch and Laura and George W. had looked into adopting children from what Gerhart calls "the Gladney home" in Fort Worth. (George and Laura abandoned this quest when she became pregnant with twins.) That's a poignant story. However, The Gladney Center is a well-known donor to Bush candidacies, and George W.'s brother Marvin and his wife Margaret, who speaks frequently as an adoption advocate, adopted two children from Gladney. There's a salient connection, missed in this book. As an avid reader, I was keen to find out what Laura Bush actually reads during all those stints on the couch with a surreptitious cigarette. However, what Laura claims to read might have been concocted by a focus group--The Bible, Zora Neale Huston, "The Willie Mays Story." It was an endearingly personal touch to learn that Laura had chosen mystery writers Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter Carol as the two females, among five writers, to lead a literary conference. The section of this book that has drawn the most attention is Gerhart's depressing retelling of the antics of the sullen Bush twins. Their mother has publicly commented upon their actions (including multiple arrests) by saying, even after the girls turned 21, "They just want to do what other teenagers do." Gerhart implies that since the twins' gestation and birth was difficult, their mother has always viewed them as little miracles regardless of the tackiness of their actions. Apart from reporting on the poshness of the travel and accommodations of various Bush family gatherings--Kennebunkport, The White House, the Vice-President's Mansion, various governors' mansions--Gerhart tells very little about Laura Bush's interactions with her in-laws, except for her formidable mother-in-law. Marvin, Neil, Jeb, and Doro are scarcely mentioned, though the index contains twelve lengthy references under "Bush family, politics as business of." Four stars to Ann Gerhart for doing as good a job as she has, under the circumstances.
Rating:
Summary: interesting, a few new insights
Review: Ann Gerhart tries heroically to get a handle on the character and personality of Laura Bush, but like other biographers before her, she is foiled by the fortress-like serenity of this imperturable woman. To readers familiar with Hippocrates' notion of the four basic temperaments, there is no doubt about it: Laura Bush is the poster child of the phlegmatic nature. She's the epitome of a stoic, self-contained woman who expends as little energy as possible in the course of living. Perhaps the most striking example of this (in addition to her "late" marriage by the early-Boomer standards of her time) is her "hand-off" attitude toward her adolescent daughters, a kind of detached resignation which has forced their father into an unlikely role as disciplinarian. "Laura-Steady-as-she-goes" is the extremely apt nickname given to her by father-in-law George. An enigma even to the most gifted biographers, she's a tough subject. Gerhart has done a little better than most, although she does reiterate some well-known facts of Bush's life. One of the most burning questions women might want answered is, why did she marry someone so far beneath her levels of intellect and emotional maturity? "He makes me laugh," Bush tells Gerhart, and uses the word "laugh" five times in one short response regarding her husband. Somehow, this reader cannot identify and must conclude wonderingly, "It must be a phlegmatic thing." (!)
Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary book
Review: Author Ann Gerhart had a tough subject, a tough case to crack in Laura Bush, and did so splendidly. The First Lady emerges as bright, more politically savvy and determined than many people would guess, loyal, and fiercely guarded and private. But despite the walls that Mrs. Bush constructs, Gerhart tells her story in a lively and informative manner, beginning with the tragic car accident in Midland, Texas, in which Mrs. Bush, driving, plows into another car and kills a high school classmate and friend. The book is fair to Mrs. Bush -- it's an admiring portrait -- but it is not uncritical. It is also a joy to read, far and away superior to the average political biography.
Rating:
Summary: Regurgitation
Review: Borrow this book. It is so full of other people's words, I wonder how one person can be given credit for the work. The writer is both repetetive and contradictory in her statements and lacks substance. I felt like I was reading a high school term paper. Don't bother with this book.
| 
