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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In this brave, beautiful, and deeply personal memoir, Laura Bush, one of our most beloved and private first ladies, tells her own extraordinary story.
Born in the boom-and-bust oil town of Midland, Texas, Laura Welch grew up as an only child in a family that lost three babies to miscarriage or infant death. She vividly evokes Midland's brash, rugged culture, her close relationship with her father, and the bonds of early friendships that sustain her to this day. For the first time, in heart-wrenching detail, she writes about the devastating high school car accident that left her friend Mike Douglas dead and about her decades of unspoken grief.
When Laura Welch first left West Texas in 1964, she never imagined that her journey would lead her to the world stage and the White House. After graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1968, in the thick of student rebellions across the country and at the dawn of the women's movement, she became an elementary school teacher, working in inner-city schools, then trained to be a librarian. At age thirty, she met George W. Bush, whom she had last passed in the hallway in seventh grade. Three months later, "the old maid of Midland married Midland's most eligible bachelor." With rare intimacy and candor, Laura Bush writes about her early married life as she was thrust into one of America's most prominent political families, as well as her deep longing for children and her husband's decision to give up drinking. By 1993, she found herself in the full glare of the political spotlight. But just as her husband won the Texas governorship in a stunning upset victory, her father, Harold Welch, was dying in Midland.
In 2001, after one of the closest elections in American history, Laura Bush moved into the White House. Here she captures presidential life in the harrowing days and weeks after 9/11, when fighter-jet cover echoed through the walls and security scares sent the family to an underground shelter. She writes openly about the White House during wartime, the withering and relentless media spotlight, and the transformation of her role as she began to understand the power of the first lady. One of the first U.S. officials to visit war-torn Afghanistan, she also reached out to disease-stricken African nations and tirelessly advocated for women in the Middle East and dissidents in Burma. She championed programs to get kids out of gangs and to stop urban violence. And she was a major force in rebuilding Gulf Coast schools and libraries post-Katrina. Movingly, she writes of her visits with U.S. troops and their loved ones, and of her empathy for and immense gratitude to military families.
With deft humor and a sharp eye, Laura Bush lifts the curtain on what really happens inside the White House, from presidential finances to the 175-year-old tradition of separate bedrooms for presidents and their wives to the antics of some White House guests and even a few members of Congress. She writes with honesty and eloquence about her family, her public triumphs, and her personal tribulations. Laura Bush's compassion, her sense of humor, her grace, and her uncommon willingness to bare her heart make this story revelatory, beautifully rendered, and unlike any other first lady's memoir ever written.
Author Notes
Laura Bush was First Lady of the United States from 2001 to 2009. She founded both the National Book Festival and the Texas Book Festival.
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
First, the prime ministership or presidency. Then the all-important memoir. And as political wives are increasingly thrust into the spotlight, to be ogled as a mix and match of celebrity clothes-horse, social worker to the nation and loyal spouse, there is a growing market for the story of what life is "really like" at the centre of power. Such memoirs tend to be drippily titled, but are often quite a riveting read. Cherie Blair's Speaking for Myself was a pacy if passionately partial account of her 10 years in Downing Street. Sarah Brown, with her million followers on Twitter, surely has an eager readership ready to devour her take on life at the top, due out next year. Spoken from the Heart perfectly fits the personal-is-political template. There is a lot of detail of designer dresses worn, official meals enjoyed, furniture and wallpaper restored, tours conducted and, of course, important political people encountered. Tony and Cherie are particular favourites, as is Nicolas Sarkozy, of all people. Vladimir Putin is given the occasional dressing down on the importance of democracy. Barack Obama is chided for his personal attacks on George during the 2008 campaign. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and "Condi" Rice are all portrayed as utterly delightful. So far, so Republican. Yet Laura Bush emerges as a substantial figure, quietly sure of her views on abortion and gay marriage. Admired where her husband was derided, she reveals a steely loyalty to George and traditional family life and a prodigious appetite for independent good works. In generational terms, she stands as the bridge between the Pat Nixon/Norma Major model of political wifehood and later, more flamboyant figures such as Carla Bruni and Michelle Obama. Interestingly, she is resoundingly silent on her successor. The book is elegantly written - the Bushes frequently being "helicoptered" to various locations aside - and begins with lyrical accounts of the harsh Texan landscape, "a land of magnificent distances and empty range". An only child, little Laura Welch was clearly much cherished. But like so many American families of that postwar generation, a blend of stoicism, puritanism and middle-class mores frequently resulted in damaging silences about life's deeper difficulties. No wonder they all drank so hard. To the end of his life, her father kept photographs of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp he had helped liberate during the war, yet he would never discuss what he had seen there. Her parents never spoke of the three babies they lost after Laura was born, including a baby son who lived for a few days. When, age 17, Laura was involved in a car crash in which a childhood friend was killed, that too was never talked about. She did not attend the funeral or ever speak to her dead friend's parents - omissions that she now deeply regrets. Yet her own daughters only learned about the crash from their secret service detail when the story became public during the first term of Bush's presidency. She here describes the accident in painful and moving detail, but it is one of the very few personal areas where she risks full frankness. In fact, much of her account of these early years is unwittingly overshadowed by another book entirely: Curtis Sittenfeld's 2008 novel, American Wife, based on many of the incidents and passages of Laura's life, including her grandmother's alleged lesbianism, her 20s as an unmarried school teacher, her sexually explosive relationship with the carousing son of a Texan political dynasty and subsequent difficulties integrating with his extended clan. Sittenfeld's novel is so brilliantly imagined that mere autobiography pales in comparison. Which is rather unfair. Is it really so surprising that we learn nothing about Laura Bush's sexual life with George, or that she skirts around his early alcoholism or deploys diplomacy in the story of her relationship with Barbara Bush, the clan matriarch? Laura Bush acknowledges that there were some significant early tensions with "Bar", but claims the two women eventually bonded over a love of art - and George. Good for them, but a bit of a yawn for us. The other shadow hanging over Spoken from the Heart is, of course, politics. The further the book progresses the clearer it is that Laura Bush has her man and his two-term record to defend. This includes two unpopular foreign wars, accusations of gross mishandling of a major natural disaster (Hurricane Katrina) and the collapse of the banks in the autumn of Bush's second term. George himself stays largely in the shadows, but Laura never misses an opportunity to defend the actions of his presidency. Her account of 9/11 and the shadow it casts over America's skies is well told, but she quickly elides the punishment of Afghanistan with a quasi-feminist mission to save Afghani women from the brutal repression of the Taliban. On Iraq, she presents a picture of a mounting nuclear threat to the west. Yet once the invasion has begun, the American presence is somehow justified on ever-shifting grounds, including the murderous treatment of the Kurds and the barbarous cronyism of Saddam Hussein's family. In a chilling aside, she describes how, when US troops captured the palace of Saddam's son Uday, they found the walls plastered with pictures of the Bush twins, Barbara and Jenna - although, rather typically, the girls were not told of the grotesque find. Bush's much-criticised failure to visit a devastated New Orleans after Katrina is explained on the grounds of presidential selflessness. "With people still trapped in their flooded homes and thousands not yet evacuated from the Superdome, George did not want a single policy officer or National Guard unit . . . to be diverted from the rescue efforts." Inevitably, such passages read like lame justifications of generally acknowledged political failings. George fades even further from the centre of the narrative as the story moves to a close. The wife of the US president has unparalleled global reach and influence; even so, we should tip our stetson to Laura Bush for her unflagging work promoting women's education in Afghanistan, literacy in general, combating Aids in Africa and gang culture in America, and speaking up boldly against military tyranny in Burma. Not bad for the shy young teacher/librarian who only agreed to marry her politically ambitious boyfriend after he had solemnly promised that she would never have to make a campaign speech. Melissa Benn's novel One of Us is published by Chatto & Windus. To order Spoken from the Heart for pounds 16 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330333 6846. - Melissa Benn When, age 17, Laura was involved in a car crash in which a childhood friend was killed, that too was never talked about. She did not attend the funeral or ever speak to her dead friend's parents - omissions that she now deeply regrets. Yet her own daughters only learned about the crash from their secret service detail when the story became public during the first term of Bush's presidency. She here describes the accident in painful and moving detail, but it is one of the very few personal areas where she risks full frankness. In fact, much of her account of these early years is unwittingly overshadowed by another book entirely: Curtis Sittenfeld's 2008 novel, American Wife, based on many of the incidents and passages of Laura's life, including her grandmother's alleged lesbianism, her 20s as an unmarried school teacher, her sexually explosive relationship with the carousing son of a Texan political dynasty and subsequent difficulties integrating with his extended clan. Bush's much-criticised failure to visit a devastated New Orleans after [Katrina] is explained on the grounds of presidential selflessness. "With people still trapped in their flooded homes and thousands not yet evacuated from the Superdome, [George] did not want a single policy officer or National Guard unit . . . to be diverted from the rescue efforts." Inevitably, such passages read like lame justifications of generally acknowledged political failings. George fades even further from the centre of the narrative as the story moves to a close. The wife of the US president has unparalleled global reach and influence; even so, we should tip our stetson to [Laura Bush] for her unflagging work promoting women's education in Afghanistan, literacy in general, combating Aids in Africa and gang culture in America, and speaking up boldly against military tyranny in Burma. Not bad for the shy young teacher/librarian who only agreed to marry her politically ambitious boyfriend after he had solemnly promised that she would never have to make a campaign speech. - Melissa Benn.
Library Journal Review
The former First Lady speaks on the record; simultaneous release with the Scribner hc (750,000-copy first printing); read by the author, who is slated to appear on Oprah. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.