Decision Points

Ok, so I decided to make myself feel better about blogging, not making this all about me, me, me! As a "Public Service" (my public being exclusively my children I'm sure), I will give a book review after I finish a book. So here goes my first review of the last book I finished. Decision Points by George W. Bush is not an autobiography, but a series of 13 essays covering what he feels are the vital decisions he made during his presidency and/or his life and the influences he had that helped him make the decision and how he feels about the decision now. It is not a book that has an extreme amount of detail, so it makes it pretty easy to read. You do get a good look at his childhood and how he was raised, that helped make him the adult he was, but you don't get much about raising his own children. He is still very protective of his family, and made this a book about him, and not his family. The 13 decision points he discussed are:

1. Quitting (mostly about quitting the vices - drinking mostly - that made him less than he wanted to be)

2. Running (about deciding to run for public office, Congress, Governor, and President)

3. Personnel (about the people he chose to be around him)

4. Stem Cells (speaks for itself)

5. Day of Fire (9/11)

6. War Footing (speaks for itself)

7. Afganistan (speaks for itself)

8. Iraq (speaks for itself)

9. Leading (about following his own conscious instead of polls mostly)

10. Katrina (speaks for itself)

11. Surge (speaks for itself)

12. Freedom Agenda (about his hopes for the Middle East/Africa/old Communist Block countries)

13. Financial Crisis (speaks for itself)

I found each "essay" to be interesting, and there were things in each one that I didn't know. I particularly liked Freedom Agenda, and Leading. There was some eye opening in Katrina that I'm sure some people (the governor of LA at the time) will be unhappy about, and I was disappointed in Financial Crisis, that he seemed to loose his "Leading" philosophy there....but I was surprised how much Timothy Geitner, the current Treasury Secretary, was involved in all the decisions made during that time. Also, I was thrilled that W talked about one of my favorite movies, a German movie called "The Lives of Others", which is an engrossing movie about life in East Germany before the fall of the Wall. I LOVE this movie, and I have to say that the fact that W watched it (it is subtitled), let alone LIKED it, let me know he is not as shallow and stupid as the "media" likes to portray!

All in all I thought it was a worthwhile read, and gave a pretty good snap shot of the time he was president. We quickly forget what we didn't know, and look at history in the rearview mirror of knowing what we know now. I respected his presidency, because for the most part I think he did what he thought was in the countries best interest, and not what would make him popular or give him power.