Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk - Hardcover

Dowd, Maureen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039915258X ISBN 13: 9780399152580

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 2004

Synopsis

Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk

About this title

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."

Reviews

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.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039915258X
• ISBN 13: 9780399152580
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544