Delusions of Adequacy

New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani has ripped into Kitty Kelley's "biography" of the Bush family, imaginatively titled The Family.

Kakutani takes particular offense at the slightness of the book, in view of the importance of the issues facing us in the upcoming election; she calls it

a perfect artifact of our current political culture in which unsubstantiated attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record and old questions about President Bush's National Guard service get more attention than present-day issues like the Iraq war, the economy, intelligence reform or the assault weapons ban.

Later, Kakutani declaims:

Though Doubleday is promoting Ms. Kelley as "a master investigative biographer," she lavishes all too much of her admirable energy on trying to ferret out personal peccadilloes, ranging from drug and alcohol binges to temper tantrums, from weight problems to bad taste in gift-giving... Ms. Kelley's relentless concentration on these matters, often to the exclusion of far more serious issues, makes for a tacky, voyeuristic and petty-seeming narrative.

Kakutani points out Kelley's rap sheet:

Of course, the reader might well ask: what else could be expected from the author of earlier books like "Jackie Oh!" and "Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star"? Ms. Kelley has always been better at dishing dirt than making sense of a subject's overall life.

Indeed.