What We've Lost addresses the fragile state of U.S. democracy with a critical review of the Bush administration by "Vanity Fair" magazine editors Graydon Carter who provides a sweeping, painstakingly detailed account of the ruinous effects of this president. [Farrar, Straus and Giroux]
Critic Reviews
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Raymond Seitz
His passionate, relentless indictment of the Bush Administration is anchored by facts and figures, which he presents in a lean, bullet-point format.
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Favorable
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The Nation George Scialabba
Surprisingly plainspoken, free of grandiloquence or snarkiness--and none the worse for it.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Kevin Phillips
There's more sophisticated documentation inside than the glib capsule might suggest.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Emma Brockes
The result is so overwhelming that it reads a little as if someone has fed "Bush, presidency, fuck up" into a search engine on the internet and loosely organised the results.
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
Basically a branded, annotated list-one tailored to a ready audience that is looking for facts to throw at undecided neighbors as debate heats up.
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Unfavorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Martin Levin
The real problem with What We've Lost (the Canadian edition should have been called What They've Lost) is that it lacks any sense of voice. Too often, it feels like a cut-and-paste job, its material assembled from other sources and full of paper-eating lists...What I wanted was to hear Graydon Carter himself, being smart and informed and angry and mischievous and witty, not merely this collage of conduct unbecoming. Too much data, too little passion.
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Unfavorable
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New York Observer Toby Young
Though adamant, What We've Lost is not particularly interesting. Compiled with a team of a dozen or so researchers, it reads like an anti-Bush primer that's been pieced together by some low-level functionary on the Democratic National Committee.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Jacob Weisberg
An underwritten compendium of data. Carter is constantly breaking prose stride in favor of bullet points, and at one point pads out 13 pages with an alphabetical listing of the coalition dead in Iraq. One can almost hear the author wheezing as he staggers across the finish line, with a chapter that recapitulates his previous complaints about the Bush administration Harper's-Index-style.
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Terrible
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Wall Street Journal Russ Smith
To be charitable, an embarrassment that one hopes the accomplished magazine editor will some day dismiss as a miscue...Mr. Carter's book has a clip-and-paste, rush-to-marketplace feel. A young journalism student could have produced a similar effort in the space of three months.
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Terrible
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Los Angeles Times Marty Kaplan
Carter gives us the gift of Googling monkeys, the kind of thing that caffeinated undergraduates churn out on all-nighters...Unfortunately, the answer to "What We've Lost" seems to be the 25 bucks the book costs.
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