The London Review of Books checks out President G.W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points:
Occasionally, someone on Team DP will insert a lyrical phrase – the tears on the begrimed faces of the 9/11 relief workers ‘cutting a path through the soot like rivulets through a desert’ – but most of the prose sounds like this:
“I told Margaret and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten that I considered this a far-reaching decision. I laid out a process for making it. I would clarify my guiding principles, listen to experts on all sides of the debate, reach a tentative conclusion, and run it past knowledgeable people. After finalising a decision, I would explain it to the American people. Finally, I would set up a process to ensure that my policy was implemented.”There are nearly 500 pages of this…
A spot of Foucauldian analysis follows of Team DP, that being the authorial voice in both print and presidency: “There are no decision points in Decision Points… [instead] a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.”
‘Damn right,’ I said [LRB via Metafilter]