One September morning in 1994, Barbara Bush writes in "Reflections," she turned on the television and "suddenly realized that, with the exception of Arafat, I knew every single person personally that I had seen on the tube during that hour."
"That's the life that George Bush has given me," she goes on. "Amazing life. Lucky, lucky me."
This observation pretty much sums up Mrs. Bush's new memoir of her post-White House life: lots of socializing with the powerful and famous; lots of girlish exclamations of love for her husband, George H. W. Bush; lots of "just folks" asides about the remarkable course her life has taken as the wife of one president and the mother of another. It is a position held by only one other woman in history, the redoubtable Abigail Adams, and a role that seems to cause Barbara Bush some measure of conflict, given her husband's and her son's crisscrossing and often clashing responses to the world.
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Years ago, when George W. Bush was still cast in the role of the family's "black sheep," his brother Jeb, now the governor of Florida, was seen as the family's political comer, and this memoir suggests that Mrs. Bush is still struggling to come to terms with the trajectories of these two sons' lives. For instance, she writes that Jeb "is an inspired speaker, and, in truth, is the best in the family." In an excerpt from her diary, she observes: "We went to Naples for Jeb. He was so good like George W., and yet so different. Jeb's lovely, patient manner is there. He speaks without notes. He is clear and firm."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/20/books/20KAKU.html
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