‘Kamikaze’ Kakutani lets George Bush off lightly

Has the cat got Michiko Kakutani's tongue? The feared literary critic of the New York Times, who has torn into Martin Amis, Nick Hornby and Jonathan Franzen with abandon in the past, has been oddly tame in her review of George Bush's memoir, Decision Points.

Kakutani believes Dubya's work lacks the "emotional precision and evocative power" of his wife Laura Bush's recent book, Spoken From the Heart, but says no more of his prose than that it is "utilitarian, the language staccato and blunt".

Oddly, she does not address the issue of whether Bush actually wrote it, even though it has been widely reported that he employed 28-year-old Christopher Michel as his ghostwriter.

Kakutani calls it "the most casual of presidential memoirs" covering as it does Bush's decision to give up the booze in 1986, and concluding with an aside about dog poop, while recalling the relationships with his scary friends Rumsfeld and Cheney and, of course, the headline events of his presidency -  9/11, Iraq and Katrina.

She makes the point that Bush uses the term "blindsided" several times to describe his feelings about a crisis he was not forewarned about. He felt blindsided over the Abu Ghraib photos scandal, and blindsided again by the financial crisis.

But while other reviewers might - and surely will - question whether Bush had the necessary political nous/attention span/intelligence not to allow themselves to be blindsided, Kakutani concludes only that: "Despite the eagerness of Mr. Bush to portray himself as a forward-leaning, resolute leader, this volume sometimes has the effect of showing the former president as both oddly passive and strangely cavalier".

What happened to the Kakutani who once described a Nick Hornby novel as a "maudlin bit of tripe", a memoir by Jonathan Franzen as "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass" and panned Martin Amis's novel The Second Plane as "chuckleheaded"?

These attacks led in turn to her being described as a "one-women kamikaze pilot" by the late Norman Mailer and "the stupidest person in New York City" by Franzen.

"Dubya got off lightly," said one New York publisher of the New York Times review, adding that Kakutani is primarily a fiction reviewer - and that there are plenty more reviews to come before Decision Points is published next week.

So, what about that dog poop?

Shortly after moving to Dallas following his departure from the White House, Bush took his dog Barney for an early morning walk. "Barney spotted our neighbour's lawn, where he promptly took care of his business," Bush writes.

"There I was, the former president of the United States, with a plastic bag on my hand, picking up that which I had been dodging for the past eight years." ·