Conversations with George Bush:
Beyond Polls and Partisanship—
Real Life in the USA

PW Forecasts Publishers Weekly, Martha Boone Mattia. Brown Books

It turns out there are many more George Bushes than those who have occupied the White House. Texas-based journalist Mattia combed the directories, found a cross-country demographic cross-section of 25 men named George Bush and set out to learn their life stories, what makes them happy and, along the way, their thoughts on the state of the union.

The result, published via a relationship publisher, is a meandering tour through everyday trials and tribulations, one that would seem commonplace if Mattia's gentle framing didn't show that she relishes every detail, from the snow globes that the Syracuse , N.Y. , George Bush collects to the gun collection the St. Clare Shores , Mich. , George Bush prizes.

It's Mattia's interventions, observations, amateur photos and choices of verbatim interview material (of which there are large chunks) that keep this from feeling like a gimmick or a vanity project—it's similar to a hint-and-miss independent documentary film, where the look and feel of the footage tells you as much as what is said. Personal anecdotes and political musings run the gamut, and Mattia allows all their say with equal measures of calm, quietly forging a poetics of what's in a name.

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