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Analysis Of ' 41 : A Portrait Of My Father

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¬ Largely eschewing the public spotlight after the 2010 release of his memoir Decision Points in favor of his painting, many were quite surprised to learn last year that former President George W. Bush had again picked up the pen to craft a very different sort of portrait than the ones he had been producing. This masterful biographical work on President George Herbert Walker Bush, fittingly titled 41: A Portrait of My Father, comes across as a genuine labor of love from a son for his father and one former Leader of the Free World to another. Indeed, through his crisp and candid prose, Bush the Younger truly does achieve his expressed purpose of writing “a love story,” as he told CNN’s Candy Crowley during an interview on “State of the Union.” In so doing, he not only provides readers with insight into his subject but into himself as well. As one might expect, then, 41 does not offer any groundbreaking factual revelations on either his or his father’s time in the Oval Office. Nor does it shed new light on the major decisions that either of them made. Any reader looking for an unbiased, purely biographical account of Bush the Elder’s extraordinary life in the same vein as other noted works on the former president and his time as Commander in Chief such as George H.W. Bush: The 41st President, 1989-1993 by historian Timothy Naftali or George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee by author Herbert S. Parmet will undoubtedly be quite disappointed. Nevertheless, this makes Bush

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