What's the Best Way to Read the Latest Donald Rumsfeld Biography?

Posted by Byard Duncan, AlterNet at 3:52 PM on July 23, 2009.

Here's a morsel of Eric B. Martin's review of the tome. Link to the full article at bottom.

PART I: WHY RUMSFELD, WHY THIS BOOK?

Donald Rumsfeld is my grandmother.

He is also my father.  Like many of us, he is a writer; like our heroes, he wants to change the world; like our villains, he was almost great, but he almost wrought destruction. He’s the scholarship kid at Princeton, a Tobias Wolff or Harry Potter. Like all compelling characters, he mostly ends up changing himself.

This is why people cannot stop writing about Donald Rumsfeld.  Cheney is opaque and static; Bush a simple prince; Condi wonky; Wolfowitz JV.  Rumsfeld though—spendthrift, moral, middle class-ish, workaholic, perfectionist, judging, prolific, linguistic, on the record, enemy to the status quo, reaching highest, failing, falling, an insider with an outsider’s soul burning with something to prove.  We all know Rumsfeld.  We love and hate him more because that’s how we love and hate grandmothers, fathers, writers, changers, heroes, villains, Harry Potter, and ourselves.

The rest here.

Tagged as: torture, donald rumsfeld, biography