(Scribner, 456 pages, $30)
When Laura Bush met her future husband, she was “the old maid” of Midland, Texas, a pretty but reserved 30-year-old librarian, said Clare McHugh in The Wall Street Journal. George W. Bush was the town’s “most eligible bachelor,” soon to mount his first congressional campaign. They were introduced at a picnic and formed an instant bond. “On that warm summer night,” Laura writes, “we were both hoping to find someone.” Three months later, she would be married, and on a path toward a very public life that would never really suit her. Writing about that life in her new memoir, the former First Lady shuts down. But the first half of the book is an artful, heartbreaking coming-of-age story.
The book “passes the first-sentence test beautifully,” said Ann Gerhart in The Washington Post. It is a memory from age 2: “What I remember is the glass,” Mrs. Bush writes. She is describing peering through a hospital window at her newborn brother, who died within days. Her parents’ loss ensured that Laura would be “shaped by the enforced solitude of being an only child,” said Ruth Marcus, also in the Post. The author and her co-writer are “good, very good, at evoking Texas in the ’50s and ’60s.” We see how the culture and even the landscape promoted quiet stoicism in the face of hardships. That closed-off habit of mind served 17-year-old Laura poorly, though, in the emotional aftermath of a tragic night when she missed a stop sign while driving and killed one of her close friends.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Profound feelings of guilt still burdened Laura when she first met W, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. The brash young Bush seemed likely to help her shake off her sense of isolation and sorrow. Yet, even as Spoken From the Heart becomes a “thoroughly conventional” account of life as a politician’s wife, we gradually come to realize that she never changed. Her “existential” loneliness is one of the “leitmotifs” that run to the final page. The other, touchingly, “is the sense of love, safety, and groundedness that Mrs. Bush found in her marriage and family.”
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
Crossword: August 23, 2025The Week's daily crossword puzzle
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”