Rating: 
Summary: Appropriately Non-Issue Portrait of a Campaign
Review: Frank Bruni's Ambling into History (The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush) is a fun read. It is shallow in its portrayal of the the campaign to make George Bush president as well the boys on the bus who followed him around. But, in this case, it is an appropriate approach as the author makes it clear the reporters cared as little about the issues as the candidate himself did. This book, instead, focuses on the look and manner of the man and in that respect presents many telling, often humourous details. This examination makes a good companian piece to Alexandra Pelosi's documentary while providing an even broader perspective, giving glimpses into the personalities of Laura and the elder Bushes and continuing the coverage into the (often too fawning) first year of the presidency. It is more a glimpse of reporters covering the man than the actual man himself. But in that narrow framework, the book is entertaining enough.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Attempt
Review: "Ambling" is an attempt to explain Bush's character by a New York Times reporter, Frank Bruni, who covered him during his presidential campaign. The problem, which is apparent right away, is that Bruni is hopelessly biased against Bush and Republicans in general. The book amounts to a hit-piece which selectively references comments and actions by Bush in an effort to dishonestly portray him in the same caricature form that many leftists cling to. As is often the case, leftist journalists attempt to overcompensate for the perception of liberals as lacking in education with a certain smugness that is immediately eviscerated by the facts. Bruni attacks Bush's intellectual qualifications yet Bush has diplomas from Harvard and Yale while Bruni has nothing of the sort. Bruni questions Bush's resolve as the latter chooses to visit his family in Texas on the weekends during the campaign. Yet Bruni gets so overwhelmed by the pace of the campaign, he ducks back into his Washington abode every few days to avoid the campaign's rigors. While Bruni tries desperately to belittle Bush's character, he merely reveals himself as ever the hypocrite and partisan. I had doubts whether a New York Times reporter, given the Times' abdication of journalistic standards on evenhandedness, could write a fair book on Bush. Bruni confirmed my suspicion that they cannot.
Rating: 
Summary: What you need to know = this is a NY Times reporter
Review: Thats really all you need. Balanced? Yeah, I have this bridge over here .. ..
Rating: 
Summary: overrated
Review: Bruni reveals nothing new or very interesting about George W. Bush. By now, his nicknames and mangling of syllables are legendary. We all know how much he values loyalty, how his campaign--and now administration--remained tightly focused on its message, how his deep faith influences him. But anyone who has watched the evening news, even off and on, for the past several years knows all this. There are no really penetrating insights, no revelations or new understandings of Bush as man or Bush as president.Still, it is nice to have these stories in one place, told and strung together by good reporting. Bruni does cover a broad (though not necessarily deep) range of Bush, and his attempt to show some sort of continuity or progression from candidacy to presidency is mostly successful--but, again, not too groundbreaking. Bush easily steals the show, and the laughs in the book come from him rather than from Bruni's sometimes strained efforts to be humorous. The book also provides fascinating insights into the lives of reporters on the road, as they follow candidates and presidents all across the country and the world, trying to meet deadlines, trying to tread a middle ground between honest, fair reporting and remaining on good terms with the subject. Overall, Ambling Into History is too much retelling, too little analysis.
Rating:
Summary: Ambling into History
Review: While the President comes off as someone I would like to know, I don't believe Bruni really gets him. Some aspects, yes. The easier to get ones. For instance the Presidents sillyness and his lesser known penchant for reading. What he doesn't get, in my opinion, is why the President is not aware of certain generation X trivia questions. While Titan and Balkan Ghosts are relevant and interesting to an inquisitive mind, people and friends are, to put it kindly, empty and a waste of precious time. Having read this book I hope to return it and get my money back and replace it with something more complete and challenging.
Rating:
Summary: The Turtle Beats The Hare
Review: Frank Bruni, a New York Times writer has written about his experience as a reporter covering the George W campaign. As he flits from one stump speech to another, his humor and keen observations save him from terimal boredom and fatique. Counterpoint to Bruni's energetic pursuit of reality is the candidate who is ambling into history, relaxed and good humored. What Georege W lacks in passion and energy is compensated for by the conviction that he has all the neccessary skills to reside in the oval office. George W was a "C" student in school and in life. He makes no apology for his mediocrity. His campaign was driven by his need to maintain cordial feelings, to travel with his own pillow from home, to make sure there was a jolly environment and to manage to sleep in his own bed as often as possible. He is the anti-political candidate who strongly feels that most of the demands of a campaign are silly and irrelevant. This does him no harm, except for a little petulance when he feels his campaign handlers have expectations that do not conform with his leisurely pace. But it is the verbal bloopers from George W that constantly threaten his success on the campaign trail. He trips over his own tongue by constructing sentences into a linear mishap, ignoring mistakes from a deficit of knowledge and misprounoucing words with more than two syllables. However, not to worry. The spoken word is written on the wind and his destruction of the English language will soon fade away. The book ends with the horror of 9/11. True to himself, George W handles the situation with a mixture of compassion, detachment and an unwavering faith in himself as a world leader. Bruni has written a book that is as refreshing and unique as the person about whom he writes.The legacy of George W is uncertain, but Democrat or Republican, you have to feel affection for this anti-hero as he is propelled through history to save mankind from "distinction"!
Rating:
Summary: This guy works for the New York Times???
Review: Boy what a waste of trees. This book is not about George W. Bush: it's about what it felt to be a moderately sophisticated political reporter following Dubya's 2000 campaign. It was, would you believe it, exhausting! Reporters didn't get enough sleep and ate too much! The candidate wasn't always available! He repeated the same speech stop after stop! Are you fascinated yet? Frank Bruni covered the campaign for the New York Times, a good paper where reporters aren't supposed to put themselves at the center of the stories they report. This must have chafed: here no happening is too trivial (Bruni breaking his laptop, Bruni dashing to the mall to buy a new pair of pants) to be included. What about Bush? will you ask. Nothing that you won't find, a hundred times better written and observed, in Bill Minutaglio's remarkable "First Son". That book also has an index, something Frank Bruni dispenses with altogether. Give "Ambling into History" a miss.
Rating:
Summary: Biased
Review: It seems as though Bruni wrote this book simply to cash in on Bush's current wave of political popularity, resulting from the war on terror. Chapters 1-4 ramble on and on and on. In these chapters, Bruni paints Bush basically as an idiot. It is literally page after page of overanalyzing everything Bush said or did on the campaign trail in 2000. I mean, everything. In these early chapters, it seems as though Bruni seeks to take innocent comments made by Bush, and then warp and belittle these comments, and inject a meaning to them that is non-existant to the average reader. In fairness to Bruni, by Chapter 5 he seems to have a more even-handed approach to his observations on George Bush. The middle of the book is enjoyable (unlike the unbearable ramblings in the first 4 chapters), and does provide for some keen observations from the campaign.
All in all, if you are an independent voter, or a fan of George W. Bush, please do not be fooled by the nice cover. The old adege about covers of books is never truer than in this case. If you can not stand George W Bush, then this is probably the book for you.
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting glimpse into the mind of GWB...
Review: This book gives the reader an interesting and intriguing glimpse into the mind and thoughts of George W. Bush as he ran for President and in the first few months of his adminsitration. After reading this book, it is difficult to believe that he has been portrayed as an ignorant, careless, arrogant politician. Instead, Bush comes off as a likable, caring, generall well-informed presidential candidate. If you need convinving the GWB is a decent individual who earned the presidency on his own merit, and not that of this father, get this book as it will quell many of your fears.
Rating:
Summary: 75% Cynical, whiney, unperceptive + 25% engaging anecdotes.
Review: I just finished "Ambling into History" by liberal NY Times opinionist Frank Bruni. The book is really about, well, Frank Bruni. Oh yes, and his impressions of GW on the campaign trail. Oh yes, and how horribly difficult it was for the journalists on the campaign trail. It spends most of the time running Bush down as the "lightweight" the Democrats portrayed him as. But what seems to shine through in an underlying poignant way is even if you have a big giant vocabulary and appear to know what all the words mean, this does not mean you possess even average skills of perception and much less certainly are able to comprehend the complexity of these things we call human beings. It also highlights how wrong conclusions can be made when made from a point of arrogant ignorance and how hard it is to abandon these wrong conclusions even in the face of overwhelming fact to the contrary of the wrong conclusion. The news media belittled Bush during the Florida fiasco for "retreating" to his Crawford Ranch and keeping a low profile. This was frustrating and incomprehensible to them - the journalists - so they concluded that Bush's behavior was more proof for their pre-fabbed and lock-stepped opinions that the man was ambivalent about becoming President and therefore not well suited for the job at all. But this conclusion, he retrospectively opines, was probably made because the news media is largely comprised of atheists incapable of comprehending the impact that [Christian] faith may have had on Bush during the difficult 37 days following election day 2000. The impact of this faith that to these same journalists is now shockingly, surprisingly and abundantly clear in the aftermath of 9/11 could perhaps be retroactively applied to the Florida fiasco. Maybe, just maybe, Bush HAD done the best he could and waited out the storm of the Florida fiasco with the patience/calm of a man whose faith dictated resolve to embrace whatever the outcome was. On the other hand, maybe Bush's faith is stronger now and sheds absolutely no new light on his previous behavior and his behavior during the Florida fiasco was politicking pure and simple and/or proof of his ambivalence for the Presidency. To use Bruni's own unvarying vernacular: is this book a portrait of a babyboomer who seeks and maintains a more modest down to Earth life than the one to which he was born into OR does it merely expose the arrogant, egomaniacal, self affected/infatuated, irresponsible personality of another babyboomer who makes his "auspicious" living writing about the events, accidents and accomplishments of other people who are actually doing "newsworthy" things? He unabashedly exposes some shocking information describing real situations where the press CREATED news (which invariably reflected negatively on the Republican candidate) and exaggerated Bush's verbal "gaffe's" by scrutinizing them excessively - but then his huge ego dictates the justification of this prejudicial and unfair practice by explaining how terribly terribly bored the poor poor stump journalists were. The weightier potential explanation of liberal bias in the news media is not even contemplated. So is Bruni coming clean on dirty journalism at its worst or is he only exposing as much of the truth as he cares to for the sole purpose of justifying journalist's (his included) biased behavior and shameless attempts to manipulate outcomes of Presidential campaigns? Each time Bruni exposes what should be seen as a shameful breach in professional journalistic integrity he immediately justifies it with the thinnest of excuses. When he "nobly" exposes the lie created by journalists that Bush's campaign was "flailing" he immediately rationalizes it explaining "It was true because almost every journalist, following a kind of groupthink endemic to campaign coverage, had decided that it was true and was reporting that it was true..." See? He explains: they had no control over this breach in professional journalistic integrity because they were victims of "groupthink" that can't be avoided when you cover a campaign. Pathetic. We are to understand that journalists belong to one big clique and cannot be expected to think, let alone write, independently, truthfully, objectively. Well, now, that IS enlightening, although I doubt seriously he intended that enlightenment. Each funny and/or endearing Bushism is followed by a shallow denigrating analysis. Each shallow denigrating analysis is cloaked in "insightful" language attempting to convey an analysis of the deepest kind. This "cloaking" which is obvious to the more intelligent and perceptive reader, escapes Bruni's "keen" observations on his own work and limitations. If you can get past Bruni's bias which is inextricably intertwined with his analysis and writing style and don't mind reading a book that is 25% depiction of a man whose potential for greatness was obvious to half of the country on Election Day 2000 and 75% a derisive run down on this same man by a less significant man whose intellect cannot comprehend the three dimensional character which embodies both earthiness and greatness when it is jammed in the authors face in close quarters day after day for months on end - then you'll love this book. The 25% that is 100% anecdotal IS touching, funny, endearing. It sheds cracks of light on the character and personality of a complex human being who is intelligent, has an earthy sense of humor, doesn't take himself overly seriously, recognizes his strengths and just as importantly his limitations, is not intimidated by anyone and stands in awe of the position he has attained. This 25% only serves to fortify the opinions and loyalties of those of us who are not surprised by President Bush's handling of the 9/11 crisis and after. The other 75% is simply the author, full of himself and his "gain a Harvard vocabulary in just 15 minutes a day" language, stomping around ignorantly, accidentally exposing the dim spots and blanks in his own intellect. I'm glad I didn't buy it.
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