Rating: 
Summary: Traces all the threads in a tangled web
Review: If you are a fan of George W. Bush, you don't want to read this book. If you are beginning to have doubts about him, you might want to - but there are a ton of worthy exposes of his lies and depradations out there, which are as well documented and easier to read. If you just want to curl up by the fire for a good red-meat Bush bashing, this won't be your cup of tea at all.Phillips is a historian first; an American second; a conservative with a conscience third. Because of the first, he is meticulous in his detail. Because of the second, he's deeply alarmed at the slide away from the Founders' ideals the last few decades have brought us. Because of the third, he feels betrayed by the way the Bush family has magnified the power of central government for the sake of crony capitalism - neither of which used to be a conservative or a Republican value. (Also because of the third, he pulls no punches in assigning LBJ and Clinton their share of blame for the long slide, in occasional asides. But the Bush clan is his centerpiece, and he mainly stays on point.) As always with Phillips, the writing style is dry, and his organization permits him a fair amount of repetition. And as always, he lines his ducks neatly in a row before setting them out to swim. My English profs taught me the word "conceit". It's the name for a strained metaphor, for which an author draws out the parallels at elaborate length. "American Dynasty" deals with very diffuse subject matter: the makeup of the American ruling elite (in both parties) across the last century; how its power has consolidated and grown less answerable to the people; and how the Bush family has plugged in, at many small points of contact, to all the major institutions that accord power to that ruling elite. To impose a sense of order on this material, he chooses to speak of the parallels between the Bush family ascendancy and various dynastic restorations of former times - the Bourbons after Napoleon, the Stuarts after Cromwell, and so on. This constitutes a conceit, and I don't think it's a particularly convincing one. But it does enliven all that detail with a kind of master narrative. The book will be indispensable to anyone who wants to trace the sources of George W. Bush's power, to know what favors he owes to whom, what favors have been called in, and what favors he is likely to raid the U.S. treasury to pay back in the future. Links to the oil industry, the banking industry, the military industrial complex, the intelligence world - many of them only cursorily explored by other writers - are mapped out here, with names and dates, not only for George II, but for his relatively honest father and his equally corrupt siblings. Phillips is careful. He investigates at length the business dealings of grandfather Prescott Bush with Germany during the Third Reich, a topic much muttered about on the Left. He concludes that those dealings were nothing unusual, were shut down well before the war, and mainly involved contacts with an old guard of monarchists rather than with Nazis. On the other hand, he looks at the evidence for an "October surprise" - most of which surfaced *after* the congressional hearing on the topic - and finds for a high likelihood that yes, Poppa Bush was involved in keeping the Iranian hostages captive until after Carter's defeat. His previous "Wealth and Democracy" is much more clear as a call to arms over the parlous state of the country. This offering, with its useful index, works best as a reference work for journalists, historians, or opposition researchers. The Bush story is crammed full of shadowy dealings with poorly reported, less than famous characters on the fringes of entities like Harken and BCCI, Skull and Bones, Enron, the CIA and Zapata oil. The very complexity of the corruption keeps it from becoming front page news. Now you can start with any name, go to the index here, and follow the thread through the weave: into the text, back out to the notes, and on to sources. If that sort of digging appeals to you, make sure you have this book ready at hand.
Rating: 
Summary: Attempted character assassination
Review: Kevin Phillips is not alone. He's actually in some very dubious company: Al Franken, Michael Moore, Paul Krugman and other brainless intelligentsia have all taken their cheap shots at President George W. Bush. Included in "American Dynasty" are all the same staid mantras the East Coast punditry have been peddling ever since GWB's rise as a presidential candidate... "He's tied to Big Oil; his family's connections have gotten him where he is; the Bushes are wealthy and therefore corrupt; Enron and Halliburton are the big, evil influences who back Dubya up; he's stupid, stupid, stupid..." ad nauseam. Such is the seething hatred of the political Left! Readers who feverishly lap up this tripe are the same folks who are still boiling over with rage that Albert Gore Jr. and his lawyers couldn't successfully steal the White House in the aftermath of Election 2000. So much for being the people of "tolerance" and "compassion" liberals love to call themselves. Just why does Phillips think this book will be any different from all the other leftwing rants available on Amazon? Could it be that he's a former Republican operative who crossed the line too much and wore thin his welcome in GOP circles? Kevin Phillips, meet Paul O'Neill. You and the failed ex-Treasury secretary will have plenty to talk about at the next general meeting of the Sour Grapes Club. In considering how I'd rate this book, I really felt that one star is one too many. ...
Rating:
Summary: Some one has an axe to grind
Review: Typical of this type of book from either side of the isle. Don't waste your time or money.
Rating:
Summary: Isn't it obvious?
Review: Isn't is obvious that our democracy is in grave danger from these people? The book emphasises this and makes the information available to people who would have to read the foreign press or really do their research to get the facts. The first (British) reviewer must be a real Thatcherite to have such a protective attitude toward the Bush family. As a Florida lawyer with a political background I understand very well how our system was manipulated by the Bush big-guns and it terrifies me. We are just short of a dictatorship. Meanwhile, the elderly are subsidizing the profits of the Bush cronies by paying excessive medical costs while the Bushes and their friends get richer and richer from the spoils of an unjust war. The poor are offered crumbs in the form of 'tax relief' in exchange for their votes. A couple of hundred dollars sounds like a fortune to these people so they believe Bush is looking after them when really they are being vicitimized. Americans have been duped and most of the intelligent ones feel deep shame that the Bush family has brought on the people of this country. Every American should read this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Bleating about the Bushes
Review: American Dynasty is a nasty attempt to smear George W. Bush and his family that fails to carry its point. This smutty book sprays around dirt, but it never gets beyond innuendo. The book's key words are "whiff", "implication", "coincidence" and "bubbles of explanation". Kevin Phillips is an influential columnist and author who has made a long ideological journey away from the Republicans since he served as a strategist in President Nixon's administration. His starting point is that the Bush family has transformed the US presidency into an increasingly dynastic office. When a son follows his father into the presidency within eight years that might seem like a statement of the obvious. In any case, as the author admits, it hardly distinguishes the Bush clan from the Kennedys, since JFK had two brothers who also sought the office, nor from the Clintons, since Hillary may follow her husband into the White House, also within eight years. The argument goes on that "the Bushes have threaded their way through damning political, banking and armaments scandals and, since the 1980s, controversies like the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, and Iraqgate imbroglios, which in another climate or a different time might have led to impeachment". That is a typical Phillips sentence. It begins with a definitive assertion of wrongdoing, and ends up in a pusillanimous whimper of wishful thinking. Take the "October Surprise" as an example. A conspiracy theory has it that in 1980 George Bush senior, then Ronald Reagan's election running-mate, signed a deal with Iran guaranteeing that the American hostages held in Tehran would not be released until after the election, in order to deny President Carter any chance of springing a pleasant surprise on American voters a month before polling day. The rumour has circulated for 20 years without being substantiated. Indeed a task force of the House of Representatives rejected it. But for Phillips it's all worth repeating "for purposes of hypothesis, not any broad affirmation". George Bush senior was once director of the CIA. Phillips traces links between the Bush family and the national security apparatus that go back generations. But so what? While he evidently regards such a connection as damning, middle-of-the-road Americans may well see it as a badge of patriotism. The author can't tie today's occupant of the White House into the CIA web, but by way of compensation merely asserts: "Under George W. Bush, the CIA has flexed more muscle than ever." QED. There are other charges against George W. Bush. He didn't really win the 2000 election, because he didn't really win Florida. That's hardly original. As Phillips admits, the Republicans spent more money on lawyers who understood Florida better, and the courts decided. As recent events have reminded us, when judges decree some will be disappointed. Since Gore squandered a great inheritance from Clinton and failed to hold his own state of Tennessee, I don't think he can claim any moral victory. Next charge: the Bushes were very close to Enron. The collapse of that company was scandalous and involved people quite well known to the President, so I read carefully to see whether this book unearthed something awkward for him. Suffice it to say, it doesn't. Then again the Bushes are said to be hypocrites because they are rich people with Yale educations who, when back in Texas, make light of their privileged background. Well, for that matter when he's back in his Sedgefield constituency I don't suppose that Tony Blair makes much of his penchant for sun-dried tomatoes drizzled with walnut oil (if he has one). Phillips is much excited by historical parallels. The Bush family, he claims, sees itself as royalty. The clear evidence for that is the caption to a photograph in a book about Senator Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W.) that reads: "the Bushes are descended from British royalty". So if the Bushes think themselves royal, then when George W. Bush got into the White House after eight years of Clinton, it was a restoration. That opens up comparisons with King Charles II of England, not least the thought that the King "displayed many of the same biases" as his father leading to unhappiness and another revolution. (No mention that Charles II was succeeded by the Catholic James II). Talking of history, there's room for Phillips to liken Bush-era America to "the right-wing Japanese regime symbolized by Emperor Hirohito and World War II prime minister Hideki Tojo", or the "saber-rattling era of Kaiser Wilhelm II", although typically he backs off by admitting that these analogies might seem unfair. Then there's history of a different kind. Painstaking research has failed to reveal whether a Bush ancestor, George Walker, was acquainted with Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky or Heinrich Himmler, but undaunted by such a gap in our knowledge Phillips happily trumpets that even if Walker didn't know them, "he certainly had plenty of friends who did". Anyway, there's another clear link to the demons of the 20th century. One of the President's chief advisers is Karl Rove, and he apparently reads Machiavelli. That Florentine thinker had "appeal to leaders like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini". Furthermore, Phillips tells us, Machiavelli's career "overlapped" with "Savonarola, the religious despot who ruled . . . with a politics of fighting sin and immorality" leading "not a few Americans to see a little bit of Savonarola in George W. Bush". The silliness of this book has no obvious limit. I want to give almost the last word to Phillips, whose prose style is worth illustrating at length. American conservatives, he says, are like Roman republicans being lured into Roman imperialism. "However, despite a resurrected Anglophone lexicon of Eurasian pivotalism and advanced Great Game theory, the dross reality of Texas-style chicken-fried empire - George Bush imperator, sprawling Sun Belt mega-churches instead of Gothic Westminster, Bible-thumping Virginia ayatollahs, Pentagon intellectuals-in-residence, doctrines of preemptive war, and Texas Ranger unilateralism - quickly sent serious historians reaching for less flattering analogies". I love the use of the word "serious" in that so-called sentence.
Rating:
Summary: too bad
Review: As a liberal Democrat I had hoped for a good book. Instead it is mostly old hashed over stories. Nothing new here.
Rating:
Summary: Devastating indictment from the GOP's Own
Review: A devastating indictment, not from typical left-wingers, but from a Republican. Phillips obviously hits a nerve, given the ignorant vitriol spewed by obviously biased right-wingers who will never admit that their Emperor has no clothes -- despite Phillips' thoroughly documented book. They'll accept no amount of facts, no amount of budgetary red ink, and no amount of evidence that W's case for the Iraq war was, at best, ill-founded and, at worst, full of damnable lies that have sent America's best to their deaths. I fear for our democracy. Bush-Cheney 2004: We put the "mock" in Democracy!
Rating: 
Summary: Good though a little biased.
Review: I'll cut to the chase: well written but a little biased. Still worth your time because Phillips makes some good points and lets you in on some stuff from the Bush family that's not well known. However I don't always agree with his analysis. He's too hard on Bush Senior who was a great President caught in a bad time (as opposed to Bush Junior, a not-so-great President caught in a bad time). If you come to this book with an agenda, you will probably read into it what you want, and miss the whole point. Read it, absorb the history and come to your own conclusions. Ignore the reviews written by the "Amazon Left/Right Wing" zealots who seem to have nothing better to do than trash books that print one word they don't like. Nobody read their favorite books, (or their reviews) anyway.
Rating:
Summary: A well-footnoted look at an evil man
Review: Who has been responsibile for the deaths of more women and children? George Bush or Osama bin Laden? Independent groups such as Doctors Without Borders and The International Red Cross place the death toll from the invasion of Iraq at between 21,000 and 55,000 as reported on the front page of the Washington Post, including thousands of Iraq "soldiers," that is young Iraqi boys forced to fight by the Baath Party (before you tell me the Post is a liberal paper, I'll tell you that the Post supported Bush over Gore in 2000 and supported the Iraq war). A BBC documentary puts the civilian death toll from the Iraq war at 10,000. You think there was terror on 9/11 when 3,000 people died? Imagine the terror we caused Iraq when at least 5,000 civilians were killed as we bombed Bagdhad. And don't forget the amputees. We caused over 1,000 civilian amputees, and this to a country that had no ties to Al Queda or 9/11. The great thing about this book is its ability to undercut the right-wing's bogus arguements about the value of going to war in the first place. Since there are no WMD found, we're told that Saddam is an evil dictator that he to be removed. In this book you'll that during the period when he was at his peak of killing his own civilians, including the period following the first Gulf war, there is the Christian Science Monitor photo of Donald Rumsfeld warmly shaking hands with Saddam--even after he had used nerve gas against the Iranians. And where did Saddam get that nerve gas? You got it. From the lavish support of George senior. The nerve gas and machine parts to make it were manufactured in MD and sold to Iraq in 1992. (My Iraqi friend tells of a joke in Iraq before the war: Bush says to Saddam, "I know you've got weapons of mass destruction?" Saddam says "how could you possibly know that?" Bush's reply "I've got the receipts.") If this kind of documentation interests you, then here is your book. Stories of Halliburton corruption, Bush ties to oil and the bin Laden family, American (read: Reagan) support for the Mujadeen who later became the Taliban...no Reagan support, there would have been no 9/11 in the first place...no Reagan Iran-Contra arms deal, and Saddam would have still been an ally, and he wouldn't have invaded Kuwait, and we could have avoided that war, but don't get me started on taffy-for-brains-Reagan. Well researched, footnoted and written.
Rating:
Summary: Thank you for the truth Mr. Phillips, may the Lord Bless You
Review: I was numb after pouriong through this book. I have always thought of the Bushes as an all-American solid family and voted for them in every election. Not any more. These people are greedy, evil, selfish and snotty. And that goes for the fat old lady too. The most shocking part of this book is the Nazi connection. I can't believe it. The one question that I have not found an answer to is this - how did that brother in Florida fix the election?
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