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Favorable
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Salon David Talbot
While Kelley is being savagely attacked as a tabloid sleaze queen, her book is more heavily researched and documented than Bush advocates allege. (It is also thoroughly entertaining.)
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Favorable
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The Guardian Robert McCrum
The Family claims to be 'an important polemic on wealth, power, and class in America'. But it's not: it's much more enjoyable than that. It's a prolix, well-researched, touchingly naive portrait of a political dynasty, but more Dallas than Camelot.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Ted Widmer
But like her or not, Kelley has brought new information to bear on a family that, for better or worse, deserves her kind of royal treatment.
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Mixed
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Andrew Cohen
Titillating as all this is, it allows Kelley to ignore Bush and the war in Iraq, the election in Florida, the influence of big oil and the Saudi royal family.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Sylvia Jukes Morris
An infuriating pseudo-scholarship pervades Kelley's dynastic story. Dozens of books, articles, interviews and "records" are massed as back matter -- 33 pages in all -- along with five pages of bibliography. Yet, because no important fact or quote is numbered in the text or keyworded in the notes, even the most diligent searcher will have trouble tracking sources...In The Family, gossip is treated as truth.
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Unfavorable
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The New Yorker
[Kelley] is best appreciated less as an investigative journalist than as a folklorist, amassing a compendium of gossip (much of it denied by her subjects).
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Unfavorable
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The Independent John Freeman
Salacious material aside, what's surprising about The Family is how little is actually news.
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Unfavorable
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The Economist
Something of a dud...It is not clear what Ms Kelley can possibly say that has not already been said...The case against Ms Kelley is not just that she fails to rake new muck. It is that she makes her principal target, the current president, look rather good.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Raymond Seitz
The White House took the unusual step of issuing a statement denouncing the book as "garbage", which, given all the other books on the shelves, is a measure of the outrage...The White House guidance is probably correct.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Stephen Robinson
Given that she and her publishers have chosen to market The Family as a savage expose of the Bush dynasty, it is striking how little salacious or genuinely damaging material she comes up with.
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Terrible
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Los Angeles Times Sally Bedell Smith
She is not so much a biographer as an illusionist who, for just long enough to get newspaper headlines, makes her audience believe she is actually sawing a body in two...Mistaking repetition for proof, Kelley's narrative has a circularity that makes the reader's head spin.
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Terrible
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
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...Some of the more titillating material in this book falls into the realm of old unsubstantiated rumors.
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Terrible
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The Spectator Vicki Woods
The book is almost impossible to follow: you have to flick-read it as though it was 700 copies of "The National Enquirer."
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