Bloomberg News Book Reviews by Edward Nawotka

Woodward Gets Bush, Plus Weill, Fiorina, Mellon: New Nonfiction

By Edward Nawotka

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- October's new nonfiction brings John Grisham's first venture outside the fictional world (the story of a man wrongly sent to death row) and Bob Woodward's third look at the Bush White House. Former Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill serves up his life's story and Lou Dobbs mulls the American dream.

``State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III'' by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster) is the month's big ``Iraq is a mess'' book, one of a growing list. The Washington Post writer's first two chronicles of the Bush White House were too soft on the president, depicting Bush mainly as a resolute leader and the White House as a cohesive unit. Time moves on. Many bodies later, and many billions too, the ace reporter comes up with evidence that Bush and his advisers, particularly Donald Rumsfeld, are stubborn and arrogant and deaf to dissent.

``The Real Deal: My Life in Business'' by Sandy Weill (Warner). The ex-Citigroup boss recounts how he rose from the streets of Depression-era Brooklyn and parlayed a job as a $35-a- week runner for Bear Stearns into a seat atop one of the biggest financial institutions in the world.

``The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game'' by Michael Lewis (Norton). Lewis does for football what he did for baseball in his bestselling ``Moneyball,'' showing how a variety of less-than- obvious factors, from evolving defensive strategies to conditioning, can affect a player's career and the outcome on the gridiron.

``Tough Choices: A Memoir'' by Carly Fiorina (Portfolio). The ousted chairwoman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, who oversaw the company's merger with Compaq, delivers a tell-all on her troubled six-year tenure and offers words of wisdom for women executives. Maybe she feels less troubled given the current H-P turmoil.

``War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back'' by Lou Dobbs (Viking). The CNN newscaster has been using his anchor's desk as a bully pulpit to rant against corporate outsourcing, illegal immigration and the federal deficit, the sum of which he claims amounts to ``class war'' on middle-class America.

``Thunderstruck'' by Erik Larson (Crown). Learn how in 1910 Dr. H.H. Crippen poisoned and skinned his wife, then fled England with his mistress on a cruise ship to North America. The authorities pursued in a transatlantic chase that featured shipboard reports sent via Guglielmo Marconi's new wireless telegraph. Larson's ``Devil in the White City'' has sold more than a million copies, so expect the new one to be piled high in stores.

``The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town'' by John Grisham (Doubleday). A cautionary tale about a mentally ill former minor-league baseball player sent to death row for the rape and murder of an Oklahoma cocktail waitress in 1981 -- and eventually exonerated by DNA evidence.

``Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor'' by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh (Harvard University Press). A sociologist ventures into a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side and finds a world where nearly everyone, from clergy to prostitutes, relies on unregulated, unreported and untaxed work to survive.

``Mellon: An American Life'' by David Cannadine (Knopf). A huge biography (800 pages) of the legendary financier, politician and philanthropist Andrew Mellon, who served as secretary of the treasury under presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, was blamed for the Depression, and founded the National Gallery of Art.

``Andrew Carnegie'' by David Nasaw (Penguin Press). Another masterly and long (896 pages) biography of a controversial Gilded Age titan: the Scotsman Carnegie, who evolved from a cotton- factory bobbin boy into a ruthless steel magnate and the world's richest man.

``Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery'' by Alex Kuczynski (Doubleday). Entertaining, sobering survey taking in everything from South African ``surgery safaris'' to ``foot face lifts'' -- by a New York Times reporter who says she has had a few things done herself.

``The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir'' by Bill Bryson (Broadway). The author of ``A Short History of Nearly Everything'' is nostalgic and sarcastic about his all-American 1950s Iowa childhood as he depicts an ennui lurking beneath the surface of that seemingly happy-go-lucky era.

``The Architecture of Happiness'' by Alain de Botton (Pantheon). The English polymath and author of ``How Proust Can Change Your Life'' returns with another breezy, brainy philosophical meditation, this time describing how public and private architecture influence emotion.

``Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies, and the Buying of Washington'' by Peter Stone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). How the lobbyist in the black fedora went about peddling power, allegedly bilking four Indian tribes of tens of millions of dollars and schmoozing with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

``Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell'' by Karen DeYoung (Knopf). The retired general and former secretary of state sat for six interviews with DeYoung in which he explained how his military career shaped him, why he declined to run for president and his strained term at the White House.

``The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream'' by Barack Obama (Crown). The junior senator from Illinois, who is being touted as the future of the Democratic Party, delivers his first political manifesto, just in time for the midterm elections.

``Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York'' by Adam Gopnik (Knopf). The Francophile New Yorker magazine writer's charming sequel to his memoir ``Paris to the Moon'' follows the Gopnik clan as it relocates to New York, and the author describes the wonders and challenges of being a parent and child in the big, magical city.

``Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer'' by Maureen Ogle (Harcourt). A history of America's favorite ballpark libation, from the heady years of early European immigration through World War I and the anti-German sentiment that declared ``the worst of all our German enemies are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller,'' to the advent of ``lite'' beer and microbrews.

``Violin Dreams'' by Arnold Steinhardt (Houghton Mifflin). A memoir by the Guarneri String Quartet's first violinist, in which he recounts that he hated to practice but was slowly consumed by a passion to master the music, in particular the difficult violin solos of Bach. (Includes a CD of Steinhardt performing.)

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)