|
| 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Draper
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $2.29
You Save: $12.71 (85%)
New (50) Used (30) from $1.90
Avg. Customer Rating:  51 reviews
Sales Rank: 210030
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0743277295
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931092
EAN: 9780743277297
ASIN: 0743277295
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: New, unread, unsed and in perfect conditions with no missing or damaged pages, may have a remainder mark.Varying degrees of shelf wear. Great Customer Service! No hassle retrns!
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Fascinating reporting, but lacks range and depth March 2, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is an important book on the Bush presidency for one reason: Robert Draper was provided unprecedented access to the most secretive President in the history of the U.S. along with many of his aides that have been previously hesitant to leak or go on the record about their President. Therefore, this book will serve future historians well as a critically important secondary source of information and perspective on the topics and people covered. Its biggest weaknesses are the lack of topics and people covered coupled with the shallowness on all the reported topics with the exception of Bush's campaigns, which are well covered.
I especially enjoyed hearing his campaign operatives' dilemma in getting Bush elected in 2000 and reelected in 2004, where they succinctly defined amongst themselves in 2000 that "Things have never been better. Vote for Change" and in 2004, "Things have never been worse. Stay the course".
The sources in the book makes some astonishing claims where Draper fails to dig deeper to provide evidence on the veracity of those claims: e.g., number of books read by Bush in a year. Also the claim that the Big Thinkers of the Hoover Institute, including George Schultz, were impressed with Bush as a viable candidate that could administrate a successful reform agenda. This opinion as expressed by Draper has turned out to be laughably absurd, making me skeptical that Schultz et al. really believed this.
I do not recommend this book to the casual observer of the Bush Presidency. The topics that are addressed are extremely narrow in scope, with no depth yielding a surprisingly ineffective portrait of the President. For example, there is no reportage between the unprecedented success of the oil industry during the Bush presidency relative to their campaign contributions to him and his party, the Bush Energy Bill that subsidized their businesses during flush times, Bush's fight to keep those discussions confidential, Bush's public pronouncements in favor of alternative energy, and Bush foreign policy decisions that greatly aided the oil industry while greatly harming American soft power and the current and future well-being of the national economy. There are many other critical events during President's Bush's tenure that also go unmentioned. Vice President Cheney and his office are rarely discussed, along with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld even though no two players were more critical to the Bush legacy beyond the President himself.
Draper also fails to address why Bush's National Security Council was and remains so dysfunctional, with a Defense Dept. seizing the responsibilities of the CIA and State and mucking them up big-time while Bush remains blissfully unaware that he and Rice, who was not unaware, can't even control their own underlings. This is the sort of managerial issue one would expect in a book of this nature, yet we get no perspective.
What Draper does do well is get President Bush and some of his aides on the record with their perspective regarding their reactions to events as they played out in the media. I was particularly interested and enjoyed reading of Andrew Card's service, who I've always viewed as a good man doing his best to serve his country and his President. We also get to hear the rationalization of virulently ignorant sycophants like Karen Hughes conducting incredibly incompetent foreign policy, like promoting the false idea to the leaders of other countries that Bush's dependence on pandering to the God vote is mandated by our Constitution which she falsely proclaims states "one nation, under God".
Probably the biggest question I have regarding President Bush is: What combination of his legacy is rooted in incompetency as opposed to corruption and blind ideology? I believe I could make an argument he was incredibly competent rather than incredibly corrupt. I can also argue the opposite. So where does the evidence lead us? Which factor is really the dominant factor and how much of a role did the other factors play? The facts laid out by Draper argue for a clear and I believe unbiased answer I won't provide here since I view that as a spoiler (I will in the comments section if asked). I do admire Draper for not attempting to answer that himself, instead letting his interview subjects hold the floor, including the President. However, since the range and depth of coverage is so narrow, I am not at all confident Draper provided enough information to allow the reader to make that judgment. So for me, the question is unfortunately left hanging where I continue to seek out a book that is able to answer this question.
 In Depth Solid Reporting February 26, 2008
I am not a fan of George Bush, but I am a big fan of this book. Well written and extremely detailed. This is a rather long but satisfying read.
The author goes into extreme detail looking at Bush from New Hampshire right through most of his presidency.
Like Bush, or dislike Bush, there is something here for every reader.
Fascinating, conflicted view of President Bush January 24, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I viewed this book with trepidation, having read reviews castigating it and others praising it. Having been repulsed by Bob Woodward's fair treatment of Bush in one book only to trash him in another, apparently to satisfy his left-wing fans, I really didn't need to read yet anothe contribution to the Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Now that I've read it, I have to ask again why some accomplished and too many wannabe biographers demand that major figures be super-human in some way? This demand drove Edmund Morris to distraction in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Numerous would-be biographers of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill and other famous and epoch making men would fail in the same way. They were unable to grasp the essential, elemental humanity of their subjects, but expected them to be like gods on Earth.
Thus Draper's treatment of President George W. Bush is far more insightful than I expected, but littered with the detritus of the hatred driven left-wing. (Draper cites without attribution, for example, the thoroughly discredited "fake but accurate" memos about Bush's alleged unexcused absence in the Air National Guard.)
If you've studied the histories of all the American Presidents, indeed the stories of all the American Presidential aspirants, you know that most of them were of relatively humble origins. It was their life experiences that formed them as men. A few, such as Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, lived in times that required, for better or worse, great decisions. Few people are interested in history to the point that they know that all four of these men were reviled in their times by significant parts of the electorate. Harry Truman, for example, still reigns as the President with the lowest polled popularity ranking at the time he left office.
Draper's search for some special greatness, if you will, and his occasional lapses into left-wing mythology mar, but don't ruin this otherwise excellent overview of George Bush's life.
Draper zeros in on the man and actually explains his essence, but is unsatisfied with the truth before him and keeps searching for some magical secret. But in truth Draper paints the man as he was and what he has become, strengths, weaknesses and all.
The essence is in Bush's address to a Joint Session where he declared war on terrorism. In that moment, as with Lincoln's decision that the Union must be preserved, Bush defined himself forever.
For the most part, Draper's treatment of Bush is both fair and interesting. He effectively covers Bush's entire life, warts and all. The portrait Draper paints is of a relatively ordinary man who decides to pursue a poltical path. Bush's two elections to the governorship of Texas and his two elections to the Presidency speak too Bush's appeal. Rational people recognize that the more than 60 million Americans who voted for Bush weren't all "stupid" or "deluded".
Draper, perhaps without intending too, demonstrates that Bush places too much reliance on subordinates who often aren't up to their jobs and is too loyal for too long. One of the most depressing parts of the book is seeing just how incredibly incompetent career personnel at State, Defense and CIA are. Bush, of course, pays the political price for being so reliant on these incapable careerists.
Like Lincoln during the Civil War, Bush has switched generals, hoping to find one who could and would win. Ironically, the book ends before the so-called surge in Iraq was fully implemented. Draper closes by observing that Bush felt he would be proven right. Interesting, recent news from Iraq seems to support his faith.
This is not a "classic" book. It is a good portrait of George W. Bush, but certainly not a great one. The author seems unhappy not to have found either some great secret or some great or greater failing. Instead he found an ordinary man who pursued political office and succeeded. Draper seems disappointed by this ordinariness, but the reality is that great intellectuals have been unknown in the White House. Perhaps the closest to an intellectual was Woodrow Wilson, whose legacy was arguably a disaster. Draper also, as noted, lapses into repeating the left-wing mantra from time to time. Some fact checking would have helped.
Overall, "Dead Certain" is a worthwhile read. Bush haters will not come away with any new ammunition. In fact, they probably won't like the book because it is largely fair and honest. Bush admirers on the other hand will quickly realize that this is no hagiography like Douglas Brinkley's paean to John Kerry. For those simply seeking to know more about President Bush, this is a worthwhile read.
Jerry
Humanizing book January 4, 2008
"Dead Certain" by Robert Draper is a well written very well researched book It is a fast interesting read. The most fascinating aspect is that it humanizes George W. Bush. It is true that the author must slide over certain events to do that. For instance, shortly after Mr. Bush took office there was an was a collision between a US military aircraft and a Chinese military aircraft near mainland China. Our crippled airplane made it to a Chinese military base where it landed without being shot at. (One wonders if, had the situation been reversed, we would have done the same....not lately probably.) Mr Draper says "It was an opportunity for bellicosity. Bush passed on it..." I distinctly remember that, instead of thanking the Chinese, offering our assistance in searching for their downed pilot, and appointing someone to go to China to arrange for transporting our personnel and their airplane home, Mr. Bush said, "They had better release our people or else!" Just about the most bellicose reaction he could have had.
These are only small flaws in a very good book. I am giving it five stars because the fact it humanizes the president so well might be a tiny step toward forgiveness. Revenge may be sweet, but it simply carries that vengeful attitude, so important to so many for so long, forward. We can't afford that (although there must be some accountability for law breaking.) We need to break the cycle.
The book helps us analyze what went wrong too. Patronage jobs were given as rewards for loyalty instead of being based on expertise, and Mr. Bush surrounded himself with people who were afraid to tell him when things were going badly. Also, he valued loyalty over integrity. This is a problem that can happen to a lesser extent even when a leader has our best interests at heart. For this reason, also, we should all read the book so we can guard against this kind of thing in our own lives and watch for it in our leaders.
The other thing that went wrong is harder to put a name to. Bush apparently felt that admitting something could go wrong showed a lack of confidence, and a president should never show a lack of confidence or he falls down as a leader. I suspect a psych course was one of his C courses and, if he had studied harder, he would have learned some other ways of dealing with readiness for adversity.
Excellent Book December 30, 2007
This is an excellent book, but not for someone looking for a hit piece on the President or the opposite, but it is well-balanced, fair, revealing the weaknesses and strengths of President Bush and the people around him. Draper uses a unique style, that apparently allows him to write in incomplete sentences, I guess for effect, which takes a little while to get used to. The only time the book dragged at all was in the telling of the problems with electricity in Iraq immediately following the fall of Hussein, but other than that it was excellent with great inside stories and quotes and other anecdotal insights.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
