The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future

Craig Unger was deputy editor of the New York Observer and editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine. He has written about George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush for the New Yorker, Esquire, and Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City.

Unger's follow up to House of Bush, House of Saud tracks George W. Bush's ascent to power, helped by Christian fundamentalists and neoconservative policymakers who themselves rise to unprecedented influence in Washington after years in the political wilderness. Bush embraces both groups with the fervor of a new convert-and with, Unger claims, devastating results on America's foreign policy. This is an exhaustively chronicled but by now familiar story of the Bush presidency, and Unger revels in the details, especially the Byzantine backstabbing and emasculation of Colin Powell and Condelezza Rice by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the tensions between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.'s inner circles. In Unger's narrative, the Iraq War emerges as a fait accompli in search of an appropriate trigger, provided by September 11 and the alleged weapons of mass destruction. The historical nuggets surrounding the rise of the neocons and the Christian right are intriguing, and Unger includes some eyebrow raising revelations, but overall he leaves readers who have been awake for the past seven years with that "it's déjà vu all over again" feeling.
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