A Bad Review of A Bad Book About an Awful Secretary of State

In the New York times book section, Robert Dallek^* has a tremendously lame review of Elizabeth Bumiller's book, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, which also appears to be tremendously lame, at least based on the following excerpt:

Ms. Bumiller says that if President Bush and Ms. Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.

The classic rejoinder is the Yiddish, "Az der bubbe vot gehat baytzim vot zie geven mein zayde." (If my grandmother had balls she'd be my grandfather.)

Mr. Dallek however appears to take this meaningless exercise as some sort of depth:

What distinguishes Ms. Bumiller’s book from other initial studies of the Bush administration and its principal actors is its absence of finger pointing or polemics. Ms. Bumiller’s biography is scrupulously fair and most notable for its above-the-battle tone. In Ms. Bumiller’s rendering Ms. Rice is neither hero nor villain but an ambitious woman whose achievements and shortcomings speak for themselves.

So Bumiller's book is nothing. An active aggressive nothing. The sort of nothing that makes the TV show Seinfeld feel like it was about something.

No analysis, no thought, just stenography.

His further quote of Bumiller is instructive:

“It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them,” Ms. Bumiller writes. “Her real ideology was succeeding.”

If this means that she thinks that Condi Rice is primarily interested in advancing Condi Rice, then it's an interesting point far too obliquely made, and if If she means that Condi cares about getting things right, I don't think so, or as a commenter on another blog says:

Wow. Doesn't tripe that insipid belong on the op-ed page under a David Brooks byline? I recognize that book reviews aren't exactly news reporting, but this is ridiculous.
Robert Johnston | 12.27.07 - 9:04 pm | #

Condoleeza Rice has been egregiously and adamantly wrong about everything, but she has continued to fail upward.

^*The doctor is right. Never trust a Dallek.