Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk
- Book Review,
by Maureen Dowd
Amazon.com
If metaphors were cigarettes, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd would be a chain smoker. Through many years and countless columns spent chronicling the fall of George H.W. Bush and the ascension of George W. Bush, Dowd has employed analogies to feudalism, The Godfather, Mini-Me, traditional "mommy" and "daddy" roles, and scores more. In this, her first book, Dowd compiles well over a hundred columns and summarizes the Bush dynasty under a single comprehensive analogy: an alternate universe called Bushworld ("It's their reality. We just live and die in it.") Dowd, who as a reporter was assigned to cover the elder Bush, seems to have a soft spot for the guy even as she describes a president with no plans to do anything but remain president. But she is alarmed by the younger Bush whom she sees surrounding himself with dangerous ideologues and starting a poorly thought-out war with disastrous consequences. Each column is relatively short, and Dowd never shares much new information, but instead offers the kind of informed skeptical perspective that's essential when interpreting the public statements of policymakers. Dowd's cleverness sometimes gets in the way of clarity, and one occasionally wishes she'd quit kidding around and say something substantive, especially since the reader of Bushworld will likely be several years removed from the news that inspired a particular column. Cleverness can be a virtue for a writer as well, getting a laugh while perfectly illustrating a point, such as when she says of the notoriously cloistered W. "All presidents are in a bubble, but the boy king was so insulated he was in a thermos." Or when she says of the Iraq War's aftermath "for the first time in history, Americans are searching for the reasons we went to war after the war is over." --John Moe
From Publishers Weekly
As scathingly funny as she is zingingly succinct, New York Times op-ed columnist Dowd has been riding Bush & Co. since his presidential campaign first gathered steam in 1999. Her approach has less to do with party than class: since winning the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for her commentary on the Clinton impeachment, Dowd, originally from working-class, Washington, D.C., has become the unlikely mouthpiece of broad-swath middle-class anger at corporate bosses, the conservative very rich and hawks of all stripes. The book collects five-plus years of pieces whose titles ("Bomb and Switch"; "Weapons of Mass Redaction") draw one into Dowd's weirdly high-low tabloid rata-tat-tat: "The Boy Emperor's head hurt. All the oppressive obligations of statecraft were swimming through his brain like hungry koi." The best of them synthesize out loud what the punditocracy e-mails to each other in private as the news day progresses. That real-time quality, with Dowd riffing out loud in medias res, doesn't always work in book form. But with events having unfolded so rapidly in the last five years, this compendium, Dowd's first, serves as a kind of summa for the mochaccino set's political grievances. Others cover the same waterfront, but Dowd's keen dramatizations of complex situations, uncannily biting caricatures and merciless re-spinning of spin set her far apart from the pack. The results remain devastating, even after the fact: "Gorzac: works to counteract nausea that occurs when you turn on the TV and see Al promising to 'let it rip'...." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
Dowd, a Pulitzer winner, preaches to the choir in this collection of purportedly humorous Bush-bashing columns from The New York Times. As these are opinion essays rather than news, the author feels free to pass her conjectures off as facts, especially if they can get a laugh. Some listeners will indeed find this audio amusing, if not hilarious; others will deem it a collection of cheap shots. The author possesses the insider's vocabulary and journalist's smug glibness that together pass for wit in the public prints these days. Narrator Kathe Mazur possesses neither, and appears to be so ignorant of this kind of political satire as to be unable to deliver the feel of it. She can't even pronounce many of the words. Y.R. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Dowd, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at the New York Times, has covered both Bush administrations, giving her a broad perspective from which to watch the son's resistance to the legacy left by his father, most prominently, his failure to rout Saddam Hussein from Iraq and to win reelection. Dowd is scorching in her analysis of the Bushes, putting them "on the couch," as they have contemptuously labeled efforts to delve into their relationship. But Dowd can't resist the Oedipal dimensions of a son seemingly bent on not repeating the errors of his one-term father and hell bent on creating crises of his own. Dowd analyzes the younger Bush's obsession with Hussein and Iraq, using the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as subterfuge to execute foreign policy long held dear by his father's hawkish advisors. She excoriates Bush as the Boy Emperor, calling his troupe Rummy, Condi, Wolfie, and the Prince of Darkness (Richard Cheney). Drawing on her columns, Dowd presents a comic-tragic look at the current Bush administration, the relationship between father and son presidents (the second set in U.S. history), and the incredible topsy-turviness of what she derisively calls Bushworld. Bush detractors will love Dowd's sharp analysis, but even his fans should acknowledge her wit. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2004
Good Dowd can balance substance and sizzle and still be acidulous and funny, drawing righteous blood with tongue...in cheek...
Book Description
From Washington to Kennebunkport to Texas to old Europe and new Europe, during the past two decades Maureen Dowd has trained her binoculars on the Bush dynasty, putting them, as both 41 and 43 have complained to her, "on the couch." Here she wittily dissects the Oedipal loop-de-loop between father and son and the Orwellian logic of the rush to war in Iraq. It's a turbulent odyssey charting how a Shakespearean cast of regents, courtiers, and neo-con Cabalists-all with their own subterranean agendas-hijack King George II's war on terror and upend the senior Bush's cherished internationalist foreign policy and Persian Gulf coalition.
As she's written about Bushworld, "It's their reality. We just live and die in it.'"
For thirty years, Maureen Dowd has written about Washington-and America-in a voice that is acerbic, passionate, outraged, and incisive. But nothing has engaged her as powerfully as the extraordinary agendas, absurdities, and obsessions of George the Younger. Drawing upon her celebrated columns, with a new introductory essay, she probes the topsy-turvy alternative universe of a group she has made recognizable by their first names, middle initials, nicknames, or numbers-41, the Boy Emperor, Rummy, Condi, Wolfie, Uncle Dick of the Underworld, General Karl, Prince of Darkness (Richard Perle), and her own nickname from W., the Cobra-as they seek an extreme makeover of the country and the world. Bushworld is a book that any reader who cares about the real world won't want to miss.
About the Author
A Washington native, Maureen Dowd became a columnist for the New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995, after reporting on the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton White Houses. She is now covering her sixth presidential campaign-and the second generation of Bush presidents who went to war with the same Iraqi dictator. Before becoming a columnist for the New York Times Op-Ed page, she wrote a column, "On Washington," for The NewYork Times Magazine. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for distinguished commentary for chronicling the Clinton impeachment follies, as the Times entry put it, "with style as well as insight, with faultless instinct for hypocrisy in high places."
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