| AMBLING INTO HISTORY The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush Frank Bruni New York: HarperCollins, 2002 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-06-621371-2 | ||||
| ISBN 0-06-621371-1 | 278pp. | HC/BWI | $23.95 | |
| Page 10: | "And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." |
| I believe this should be "will hear from all of us soon." |
| Page 23: | "This was where he waited out the Democratic National Convention, during which the Republican ticket was guaranteed about as much attention from the news media as a Massapequa dinner-theater production starring Sally Struthers might receive." |
| Sally Struthers cannot be called a great actress, so this is not an error. Still, Bruni might have chosen a simile less cruel. |
| Page 38: | "Think of your speech the way you think of meals: at least three a day is best." |
| Error of number: S/B "your speeches". |
| Page 39: | "He also believed that the country should pursue free-trade policies that knocked down not just tariffs and barriers but "bariffs and terriers,' and the spaniels and retrievers could only wonder if they would be next." |
| Again this is not an error, and clearly was done to let Bruni make a humorous point. But there is a legitimate word "tarriers". An old song has it that, after a premature dynamite blast, one of them is famously docked for the time he is up in the sky. |
| Page 43: | "He added that satellite-type 'dishes will be able to carry enough bandwidth to have two-way communications, hopefully, someday, which will be able to solve part of your problem, whether you can get bandwidth through your telephones and/or cable TVs' Satellites? Bandwidth? Austin, we have a problem." |
| Actually, in this case Bruni has the problem. Bush gets it, though he doesn't express it well. With respect to rural communities finding a future through the "information superhighway", access and bandwidth are the major bottlenecks. Wiring all those remote households with DSL or fiber-optics is very expensive; high-bandwidth, two-way communication via satellites looks more cost-effective. |
| Page 90: | "In a nod to Hispanics, Gloria Estefan sang 'Get on Your Feet' and Richie Valens crooned 'La Bamba'." |
| Sorry, Frank; Richie Valens' "La Bamba" is as far from crooning as (in your opinion) Sally Struthers' acting is from noteworthy. |
| Page 182: | "...an interview that I and Allison Mitchell, a Times colleague who also covered the campaign, did with him during the tense, fraught period of the campaign between the conventions and Election Day." |
| Grammar: "fraught" requires some allied emotion, as "fraught with anticipation". Or so I've always believed. But the third definition of fraught as an adjective in the on-line Merriam- Webster Dictionary is "causing or characterized by emotional distress or tension ". So Bruni is OK on this point. |
| Page 192: | "One three occasions, several of us lit up only a few yards from the campaign plane—we had just been in the air, and deprived, for two or three hours—and were threatened by airport officials with $10,000 penalties. It was apparently not a good idea to strike matches or play with any kind of fire on a tarmac, around all that jet fuel. Who knew?" |
| Well, Frank, almost anyone — even if they don't travel frequently by plane, as you do. |
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