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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (Hardcover)
I am probably one of the few people reviewing this book who hadn't read many of Ms. Dowd's columns before reading the book. That being said, I found the book to be a nice surprise on at least two levels. First, the facts it filled in for me about what goes on and has gone on for generations in the Bush family were way more valuable to me than the clever nicknames (41, 43) that peppered the text. Second, her unique style, from which said nicknames derived, allowed her to talk about the history of the Bush family in a both a humorous and forlorn manner that few writers could pull off. The only reason why I didn't give it five stars is that I found myself when I finished the book thinking, "That was intriguing... funny... but now what?" It was, in the end, an interesting spectacle, but did she write it for anything else other than to make clever jokes? After all, she made fun of Gore and Clinton, and Reagan, etc. etc. etc. too. Is there anything she doesn't turn a cynical eye toward? One of earliest sentences in the book says it all. "It's their reality. We just live and die in it." Is she really making an anti-Bush statement, or is she just making fun of a "current President?" The book is humorous, but it's unlikely to move liberals to social action. If it's really already Bush's reality, after all, what's the point?
