book review?

So i just finished The Faith of George W. Bush by Stephen Mansfield.

barnes and noble online was having a really cheap booksale this summer and i picked it up then...

before having read other people's reviews (on say amazon.com... see link when you click on the title above), my comments would be the following:
from reading this book i learned many things about the president i had no idea about before. the goal of the book is to weave together the story of his journey of faith through quotes and anecdotes about the president's life, and the book weaves more of a complex figure that i would have necessarily thought of before. it was fascinating for me to read about all kinds of aspects of pres. bush i'd never thought of before. i wondered from time to time what bush himself would think of the way his life was told in this book.

since this book is written (obviously from the title) as bush's biography from the perspective of looking at the religious aspects of it, people who are not religious probably have little to no interest in some sections of it and would disagree with some of the phrasing used in the book... but this is obvious from the title... if the topic isn't your cup of tea, so be it, and that's fine.

that sector of the book-reading population aside, i think you can read a book like this whether you like the president and his policies or not. on a totally different tangent from what i thought of the book (2 paragraphs ago... i.e. i enjoyed it and was intrigued by what i read as many of the anecdotes it told were new to me, so it was quality recreational reading for me)... it annoys me to see some of the reviews on amazon. it seems to me that many people wrote reviews of the president rather than reviews of the book. i don't think that mansfield (the author) paints a picture of bush as the most holy pious man on earth. he gives stories and reflections of people who have met bush, and his main goal in the final chapter and epilogue is to point out that you can't stereotype anyone or you lose their complexity and their humanness in the process (he even points out that bush, in his speaking, is guilty of this)... more than anything, i think mansfield points out that bush is a real, human, omplex, and interesting figure... that's he's not flat and one-sided... that he's not as simple-minded or stupid as he at times appears and/or is portrayed in the public sphere... that there's depth to him. i think it's possible to accept him as a complex and deep character whether you like him or not.

excerpts from one review that i actually respected (on amazon):
"I was skeptical, but am now impressed, That is with the book, not with President... For me, this book developed President Bush into a real person, a flawed, but rich personality... "

that, i can respect. my feelings on the president go back and forth... my voting history in general is about half and half between the two major political parties and i hate laying claim to either, i vote for the person i think will do the best job... while i did vote for bush both times he ran for president, that isn't to say i follow him wholeheartedly or that i agree with everything he does, because that's far from true... i think no leader is perfect, and all too often the only things we think of them are what the public spotlight shows us, which washes out a lot of the human-ness of the person. this book, for me, filled in more of the complexity of making bush into more than a public cardboard cutout. it made him more real, virtues, faults, and all.

(this was extremely rambly... sorry)

to the people on amazon who write crazy things: review books, not people... there IS a difference