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The Family
The Real Story Of The Bush Dynasty
by Kitty Kelley


2.5

based on 13 reviews
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based on 2 votes
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Official Publisher Site

The "First Lady of unauthorized biography" reckons with the first family of the United Statesand the result is a shocking history and a very human portrait of the worlds most powerful dynasty. [Doubleday]

Doubleday, 736 pages
09/14/2004
$29.95

ISBN: 0385503245

Nonfiction
Biographies & Memoirs
Current Events & Politics

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Salon David Talbot

While Kelley is being savagely attacked as a tabloid sleaze queen, her book is more heavily researched and documented than Bush advocates allege. (It is also thoroughly entertaining.)

The Guardian Robert McCrum

The Family claims to be 'an important polemic on wealth, power, and class in America'. But it's not: it's much more enjoyable than that. It's a prolix, well-researched, touchingly naive portrait of a political dynasty, but more Dallas than Camelot.

The New York Times Book Review Ted Widmer

But like her or not, Kelley has brought new information to bear on a family that, for better or worse, deserves her kind of royal treatment.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Andrew Cohen

Titillating as all this is, it allows Kelley to ignore Bush and the war in Iraq, the election in Florida, the influence of big oil and the Saudi royal family.

Washington Post Sylvia Jukes Morris

An infuriating pseudo-scholarship pervades Kelley's dynastic story. Dozens of books, articles, interviews and "records" are massed as back matter -- 33 pages in all -- along with five pages of bibliography. Yet, because no important fact or quote is numbered in the text or keyworded in the notes, even the most diligent searcher will have trouble tracking sources...In The Family, gossip is treated as truth.

The New Yorker

[Kelley] is best appreciated less as an investigative journalist than as a folklorist, amassing a compendium of gossip (much of it denied by her subjects).

The Independent John Freeman

Salacious material aside, what's surprising about The Family is how little is actually news.

The Economist

Something of a dud...It is not clear what Ms Kelley can possibly say that has not already been said...The case against Ms Kelley is not just that she fails to rake new muck. It is that she makes her principal target, the current president, look rather good.

Daily Telegraph Raymond Seitz

The White House took the unusual step of issuing a statement denouncing the book as "garbage", which, given all the other books on the shelves, is a measure of the outrage...The White House guidance is probably correct.

Daily Telegraph Stephen Robinson

Given that she and her publishers have chosen to market The Family as a savage expose of the Bush dynasty, it is striking how little salacious or genuinely damaging material she comes up with.

Los Angeles Times Sally Bedell Smith

She is not so much a biographer as an illusionist who, for just long enough to get newspaper headlines, makes her audience believe she is actually sawing a body in two...Mistaking repetition for proof, Kelley's narrative has a circularity that makes the reader's head spin.

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

Though Doubleday is promoting Ms. Kelley as "a master investigative biographer," she lavishes all too much of her admirable energy on trying to ferret out personal peccadilloes, ranging from drug and alcohol binges to temper tantrums, from weight problems to bad taste in gift-giving... Ms. Kelley's relentless concentration on these matters, often to the exclusion of far more serious issues, makes for a tacky, voyeuristic and petty-seeming narrative...Some of the more titillating material in this book falls into the realm of old unsubstantiated rumors.

The Spectator Vicki Woods

The book is almost impossible to follow: you have to flick-read it as though it was 700 copies of "The National Enquirer."

The average user rating for this book is 2.5 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Mike G. gave it a4:
This book is all over the place. It's a contradiction throughout: thorough in places, slipshod in others, well written here and there, clumsy for the most part. Your interest in this book will depend on how much you've read about the Bushes before and how much you know. I found the stuff about Bush 41's government service in the 1970s interesting; others might not. The pop psychology gets a little tired after a while; a stronger writer than Kelley would have told her anecdotes and let the reader draw his own conclusions. The prose is erratic. I joked to my wife that a few of the opening chapters sound like the painful beginning of a 10th grade book report on a boring topic. This isn't a horrible book, but it could have been much better.

Shirley H gave it a1:
Total Garbage. Yeah, I'll be looking for Laura Bush on the White House tour next time I need a dimebag. Kelley is a hack of the highest order.

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The Family The Real Story Of The Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley

The Family
The Real Story Of The Bush Dynasty
by Kitty Kelley