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Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk
by Maureen Dowd
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Putnam Adult (2004-08-03)
ISBN: 039915258X
EAN: 9780399152580
Dewy Decimal #: 973.931092
Hardcover: 544 pages
Release Date: 2004-08-03
SKU: 05278
Condition: Collectible: Very Go
Comments: First edition book, in very good condition
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Editorial Reviews
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Product 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.
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Amazon.com Review
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
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Customer Reviews
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A book worth picking up
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-06-18
I read a very favorable review of this book at a site called www.spunkybean.com and it compelled me to go right out at lunch and pick it up. Only 25 pages into it, I can tell I'll be reading it well into the evening. [...]
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An excellent book
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-04-30
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Ms. Dowd definitely had vision and understanding of exactly what we would be looking at as a nation. She could see the damage that was going to be done by King George Bush. It is eerie to read this book now when it was published at the end of 2004.
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Not even a Bush-Hater can Like This Book
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-03-24
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Dowd's satirical style works in the small doses of her columns, but does not work as a full-length book. Nobody hates Bush more than I do, but Dowd's analysis is superficial and just wrong. Yes, it's satire, but there has to be an essential grain of truth for it work. To say that Bush, who appears to be quite savvy politically, is simply a stooge for his advisors or is not in charge of his own administration is ridiculous.
Unfortunately, Bush is quite in charge, and his failure as President demonstrates the enormous power of the institution and the enormous harm that can be done when we elect the wrong person at the wrong time.
Dowd does convincingly demonstrate and lampoon Bush's woeful lack of preparation for the foreign relations aspect of his job. And it is true that one's personal prejudices and insecurities can enter such a vacuum of information and preparation to control decision-making. But it's clear that the problem of Bush's foreign policy goes beyond his personal failings and the maddening rigidity of his chief advisors. Bush and his team are the logical extension and conclusion of Reagan. The conservatives have to take the bad with the good. One can argue that the era of 1974 to the present is, in historian Wilentz's phrase, the "Age of Reagan." Reagan's successes in the Cold War and in inspiring national optimism came at the price of financial irresponsibility, denial of facts in the belief that we can shape our own reality, unilateralism, and short term thinking. Reaganism has now collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and by reason of its fundamental lack of soundness.
Of course, it's a lot more fun just to hate, or to love, Bush. But a book like this should grapple with the larger themes presented by the problems of the Bush Administration. It's self-indulgent and short-sighted just to focus on personalities.
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Great Book
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-11-25
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is just a great book from beginning to end. She tells it like it is and it is SCAREY. They could have titled it, 'How The Neo Cons Conned America Into Oblivion' but that would have been too long.
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Just got it yesterday
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-07-22
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
at the local Dollar Tree store. Well worth the cost for a hardback book. I will likely pass this around to many others for a fun read. I have other Bush bashing books that I also enjoyed reading. It scares me though that through him and his cronies, our ACL are being taken away, our country is being physically and ethically destroyed while collectively we turn a blind eye.
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