The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush
Author: Ann Gerhart
The intimate and critically acclaimed biography of the much-admired First Lady -- now in paperback with a new post-election Afterword by the author -- The Perfect Wife tells the complete story of Laura Welch Bush. From Mrs. Bush's upbringing in West Texas to her whirlwind romance with George W. Bush to the Governor's mansion to her roles as mother, Bush family member, First Lady, and savvy political campaigner, Gerhart reveals her as never before.
The New York Times
… as Ann Gerhart writes in The Perfect Wife this is a bright, educated, exceedingly well-read woman, with many liberal friends who cannot abide her husband's conservatism. She has a separate intellectual life that leads her to opera and poetry and serious literature -- a life that, well, seems an odd match with the interests of her husband. Beneath her placid exterior, Gerhart sees ''an independence that seems almost subversive.'' — Robin Toner
The Washington Post
… Gerhart's The Perfect Wife is only partially a book about the life and "choices" of First Lady Laura Bush. What it is really, more profoundly, is an interface between our author, a high-powered working mom (spurred on by like-minded acquaintances -- the Washington "many," the in-the-know "people" whose never-specified voices often resonate in the background) and her subject, a woman whose traditionalist lifestyle stumps, angers and maddeningly provokes Gerhart and her companions, inspiring a kind of bilious wistfulness that creeps through on every page. — Ann Gerhart
Washington Post
Gerhart is a wonderful observer, with a keen eye for detail and an excellent ear for conversation.
USA Today
We may have to wait until history loosens lips to learn how much influence Laura Bush has in the White House. Meanwhile, Gerhart has made a good start at introducing us to the woman behind the smiling public mask.
New York Times Book Review
Gerhart has written an interesting book that at times makes Mrs. Bush seem a modern version of those nineteenth-century Edith Wharton wives, finding their own rich private lives amid the hard conventions of marriage and motherhood.
Washington Monthly
Well-reported and perceptive...[it] is a short, breezy, guilty pleasure of a book, full of juicy quotes and anecdotes....Gerhart offers an unflinchingly clear-eyed view of her subject's foibles.
Washingtonian
The Perfect Wife is an admiring, sympathetic account of why Laura Bush is so darn nice.
Publishers Weekly
Gerhart's portrait of the first lady is much like the public perception of her: a pleasant, opaque woman and a conundrum. A schoolteacher with a master's degree in library science, Laura Bush is clearly intelligent and articulate. Yet despite her credentials and her husband's evident respect for her opinions, she appears, from this account, to have no influence on his education policies nor does she seem to want any. Her determination to be what Gerhart terms "an old-fashioned first lady" alternately fascinates and frustrates Gerhart, a Washington Post reporter who has been covering her since the 2001 inauguration. Both reactions are understandable. For all her research, Gerhart never answers the central question she posits: how did an independent, liberal (she voted for Eugene McCarthy) career woman who purposely chose to teach in a poor elementary school in Austin morph so successfully into a devoted wife whose life's ambition is to make sure her husband's world runs smoothly, even if it means subverting her own beliefs and desires? Laura Bush's submission is apparent in such observations by Gerhart: "I noticed how much more animated and commanding she was when acting solo. When she traveled with the president, she faded to the background." Then again, given how carefully Laura Bush guards her privacy and her feelings, it's doubtful anyone could have cracked that mystery. But Gerhart succeeds in steering clear of the "sneering and sniping" often directed at Laura Bush in this not unsympathetic probing of the first lady's mysteries. Agent, Rafe Sagalyn. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
After many chats, a Washington Post reporter delivers this biography. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
If there's more to the 43rd president's spouse than appears in this surface-scratching biography, Washington Post Style reporter Gerhart ain't telling. The material for this profile of Laura Bush was gathered from Bush herself, as well as from friends and acquaintances. They are (surprise) a protective lot. The First Lady is not one to offer opinions: " 'If I differ from my husband,' she once tartly told a reporter, 'I'm not going to tell you.' " In Gerhart's glib depiction, Bush is accommodating and graceful, traditional and placid-"serene order," the author suggests, hovers about her-serving as a counterpoint to her husband's loose-cannon antics. She ran a stop sign when she was 17 and hit another car, killing a friend (an incident that taught her caution and compassion, says Gerhart), but there's little else here of substance about Bush's early years: "Doing what 'really traditional women do' means selling short those years before your marriage," the author suggests. The nub of it all, according to Gerhart, is that Laura Bush is "serious about her marriage." She would "do the emotional toting and lifting . . . while the man busied himself out in the greater world." Then there is the rub: "She wanted to be needed . . . being needed felt purposeful and satisfying because her husband's happiness and success were possibly more important than her own." This seems poignantly close to self-immolation, an opinion reinforced by such comments as, "I don't do anything I don't want to do." The author grasps at straws, but even these Bush keeps neatly bundled away; she is the classic solid that melts into air. In overcompensation, Gerhart is all too obvious, cooing and cutting lots of slack, aswhen she refers to their $1.2-million Texas spread as a "modest home." Cracking the ancient runes would be easier than trying to get under the skin of Laura Bush. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn/Sagalyn Agency
Interesting book: Best Loved Hersheys Recipes or Cooking Activities A to Z
The Bloody Shirt: Terror after the Civil War
Author: Stephen Budiansky
From 1866 to 1876, more than three thousand free African Americans and their white allies were killed in cold blood by terrorist organizations in the South.
Over the years this fact would not only be forgotten, but a series of exculpatory myths would arise to cover the tracks of this orchestrated campaign of atrocity and violence. Little memory would persist of the simple truth: that a well-organized and directed terrorist movement, led by ex-Confederates who refused to accept the verdict of Appomattox and the enfranchisement of the freedmen, succeeded in overthrowing the freely elected representative governments of every Southern state.
Stephen Budiansky brings to life this largely forgotten but epochal chapter of American history through the intertwining lives of five courageous men who tried to stop the violence and keep the dream of freedom and liberty alive. They include James Longstreet, the ablest general of the Confederate army, who would be vilified and ostracized for insisting that the South must accept the terms of the victor and the enfranchisement of black men; Lewis Merrill of the 7th Cavalry, who fought the Klan in South Carolina; and Prince Rivers, who escaped from slavery, fought for the Union, became a state representative and magistrate, and died performing the same menial labor he had as a slave. Using letters and diaries left by these men as well as startlingly hateful diatribes published in Southern newspapers after the war, Budiansky proves beyond a doubt that terrorism is hardly new to America.
The New York Times - William Grimes
If "Profiles in Courage" had not already been taken, it would have made the perfect title for this linked set of portraits honoring five men who risked everything to fight for the principles that had cost so many lives. It is an inspiring yet profoundly dispiriting story.
Publishers Weekly
Budiansky has clearly done his research on this interesting and largely unknown history of the American South, detailing the origins of America's largest homegrown terrorist sect, the Ku Klux Klan. While the tales are often disturbing and naturally disquieting, they are important stories of real men that have waited decades to be told. Phil Gigante does his very best to insure they are given the appropriate respect they deserve. He offers a solid, unwavering reading that captures the raw brutality and extreme melancholy of the period of the South's reconstruction (1865-1876). Gigante's spellbinding narration is careful never to sound too sympathetic or editorialize, but presents the author's material in an unbiased and dispassionate voice, allowing the truth within to speak for itself. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 10). (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
Serviceable overview of vigilante violence in the Reconstruction-era South and its victims. Historians have long observed that emancipation was a half-gesture: Scarcely any provision was made for the freed slaves, and it was all too easy for former owners to proclaim-as one of those who people military historian Budiansky's pages does-that freed slaves would not be paid wages for doing the same work as they did while in bondage. "You shall work for me as you have heretofore," the owner told the manumitted slaves, "and I will give you the same treatment you have always had, the same quantity and quality of food, and the same amount of clothing." The victorious federal government set to work with 40-acres-and-a-mule schemes, instituting Reconstruction and appointing military and civilian governors throughout the South, some of them black. Defeated Southerners mounted resistance through groups such as, most famously, the KKK. Other groups operated at the local level, as with one self-described "committee" that warned that an Englishman who rented Louisiana land to freedmen would be punished by being burned out: the gin house first, the rest of the place next. "If that don't break it up, we will break your neck," the committee warned. How the Englishman responded we do not know, but Budiansky (Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage, 2005, etc.) tracks the fortunes of several Reconstruction appointees, as well as those of the renowned Confederate general James Longstreet, who took time to remind the guerrillas that their cause had, in fact, been defeated, adding, "These issues expired upon the fields last occupied by the Confederatearmies. There they should have been buried." Longstreet's intercession did not make Reconstruction any easier-and, writes Budiansky, the general suffered terribly for having voiced such views. The Longstreet episode is one of the best in the book, which covers ground well discussed elsewhere in the historical literature.
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