The reckless reign of W.: we are still living with the forty-third president's legacy.

• Author: Longman, Martin
• Position: George W. Bush - Book review

George W. Bush

by James Mann

Times Books, 208 pp.

Until his death in 2007, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. served as editor of the Times Books series called "The American Presidents." Since that time, the Princeton historian and professor Sean Wilentz has edited the collection, which aims to "present the grand panorama of our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the scholar." For the edition on President George W. Bush, Wilentz enlisted the services of James Mann, award-winning reporter and author of Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet.

Here, as is sometimes the case, the genre dictates the form: the biographies are supposed to conform to a standard: they should be "meditation-length biographical essays" that distill the "life, character, and career" of each president while focusing primarily on their time in the White House. This is not a polemical book.

That in itself presents a challenge to the author who must contend with a presidency and an era in which the definition of reality itself had become contentious.

On the whole, however, James Mann has done a commendable job of recounting the early life of George W. Bush, his rise as a politician, and the major events and decisions of his two terms as president. Mann maintains an evenhanded tone without being noncommittal about the countless controversies that arose during Bush's presidency. At the same time, to his credit, Mann doesn't allow the imposed format to force him into an uninteresting recitation of facts.

The Bush presidency was birthed on television as the nation sat riveted to images of poll workers examining hanging chads during the recount in Florida, a painful process that was ultimately short-circuited by the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore. When the country and the courts cannot even agree on what constitutes a vote or who actually won an election, it doesn't augur well for a dispassionate interpretation of a presidency.

Even those who are familiar with Bush's basic biography and paid close attention to politics during his terms in office will find insights, both trivial and substantive, that help flesh out their understanding of the forty-third president and his administration. The reader will be interested to learn, for example, that when he graduated from flight school in the Texas Air National Guard it was his father who pinned his wings on him and gave the commencement address. Or, that during the Florida recount, Bush spent his time at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, which did not yet have any cable or satellite television. With little details like this Mann keeps an otherwise familiar and dispiriting narrative fresh.

The opening chapters familiarize the reader with the Bush clan and W.'s life and experiences from birth through his two terms as governor of Texas and "election" as president. While Mann treads lightly around controversies like Bush's alleged time AWOL during his service in the Alabama National Guard (never mentioning the name Dan Rather, for example), he pulls no punches in describing Bush's period as a self-described "boozy kid." At Yale, Bush served as president of Delta Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity...