Rating: 
Summary: UTTER GARBAGE
Review: How many different ways can you describe garbage? Let me try .... this author couldn't sell this work to any reputable publishing house. None of this work can be verified by any reputable source. For example, military personnel records are kept confidential, much like any employment record. The sad part is that this piece of pure fiction is still cited by the anti-American (read: anti-Bush) crowd as "fact" and spread via a number of crackpot internet sites. The American Left is completely devoid of ideas and candidates and has been reduced to actually hoping for the worst for America. Hatfield's piece of fiction has been thoroughly discredited by even the laziest of journalists willing to do a small amount of legwork. He wrote this piece of [garbage] while in prison. It shows how intellectually bankrupt American Leftists are when they are reduced to citing this garbage to attack a great American president.
Rating: 
Summary: A Well Documented Account
Review: I have just finished reading Fortunate Son and have perused most of the reviews here. I am noticing that the negative reviews focus on discrediting the author. To them I say: Go ahead and pore through his well-documented sources and pick them apart...then come back and discredit based on fact.
I found the book to be surprisingly fair to Bush from the beginning to my surprise. At times I felt drawn to Bush like I wanted to have a beer with him! I am outraged that the first run of this book was actually burned though. And the "suicide" issue is highly suspicious at best. I challenge the Republicans to respond to the facts in this biography intead of focusing on the author. Many good books have been written by convicts. What's the point?
I give a Four instead of a Five star review because the AWOL issue wasn't adequately addressed. I would give it a 4 1/2 if I could!
Rating: 
Summary: How On Earth Did This Man Become President?
Review: I just finished this book. I don't write too many reviews on amazon dot com because they tend to get dismissed by people of opposing view points.However with this book, all that it contains are facts. Honestly, it's more of a complete biography if you will, containing every act that W. did during his rise to the white house. Starting with a little info on his father to get a mark on what his atmosphere growing up was, it lists the good and the bad things he has done over the years. Inside stock trading, flip flopping stances on various issues, covering for his friends along with his fathers friends, are what await you in this book. This book has little to no speculation, (and those comments are posted as footnotes, not in the main text) so the reviews that are saying there are no facts to this book are wrong. I urge you to read this book before you vote in the coming November.
Rating:
Summary: Proven right over the passage of time
Review: I purchased this book 2 or 3 years ago when it was extremely difficult to find a copy and when it had a less attractive cover. I had heard about it by word of mouth and was able to find someplace on the Internet where I could buy a copy. I am pleased to see that it is somewhat easier to purchase a copy now. Yes, the author was charged with attempted murder. Even more interesting, for those of us who understand how poli-tricks works, the author's past discretion became public knowledge at just the right time to convince his first publisher to bury the book .... and at just the right time to over shadow media stories from other folks regarding crimes W. committed. There was a foreword in the copy I purchased, hopefully still in the current edition, which provides an informative insider's look at just how the Bush-Rove machine manipulates the press, public, and media big shots to discredit anyone who dares try and make public any of the _many_ indiscretions of their fortunate son. But, it is now 2004 and several other authors without Hatfield's baggage (Molly Ivins, Michael Moore, and Al Franken to name just a few) have published books which make similar claims against W.'s despicable past. Truth be told, Fortunate Son was considerably kinder to W. than the more recently published books. See the link below for a story from the Boston Globe which confirms Hatfield's claim that Bush went AWOL: http://awol.gq.nu/AWOL_Globe%20series.htm It is a fact, a fact which can be proven by anyone responsible enough to do the research, that W. avoided serving in the Vietnam War by getting into the Houston Air National Guard ahead of more qualified candidates because of his pedigree, that he later went AWOL, that he got away with it also because of his pedigree, and that his absence coincidentally allowed him to avoid taking a pee test which would have proven if he was on drugs at the time. The right could have easily and definitively put this issue to bed by simply trotting out someone who W. served under to dismiss the story as untrue. But, they have never done this which is the most incriminating fact of all. Look for this issue to come up repeatedly in the 2004 presidential election campaign. Ray W.
Rating:
Summary: The truth is out there - probably
Review: I put off reading this book for a long time, thanks to the questions we all had about Hatfield's integrity and the credibility of his charges against the Accidental President. This newly updated and better-annotated edition put these concerns to rest, and although it's not the best Bush biography I've read thus far, it deserves far more respect than it's received from the mainstream media. For a book which Bush's supporters went to great lengths to prevent from ever being published, Hatfield shows a surprising lack of antagonism toward his subject for the most part. Molly Ivins' "Shrub," Mark Crispin Miller's "The Bush Dyslexicon" and Paul Begala's "Is Our Children Learning?" are all far more openly partisan (and better written), but Hatfield does provide information not available elsewhere about the youthful indiscretion that Bush and his allies have otherwise done a superb job of keeping buried. Using straightforward accounts from the public record and those who know him, Hatfield illustrates such issues as Bush's obliviousness to racial segregation in his hometown, his indifference to his studies at Andover and Yale, his alcoholism, his spotty record in the Air National Guard, his questionable business dealings, and his performance as governor. Bush's actions and words speak for themselves throughout the book, and Hatfield shows little inclination to analyze them to death or to put an actively anti-Bush spin on them. In fact, he occasionally sounds pro-Bush, noting, for example, that he got off to a respectable start in the oil business after graduating from Harvard Business School. Some of the less flattering accounts, such as that of his "service" in the Air National Guard, have a necessarily vague and incomplete feel to them, mainly because there simply isn't a lot of reliable information available about that period of Bush's life. Hatfield is, however, able to provide a number of accounts of cocaine use and womanizing that stand in sharp contrast to the family-values image Bush's handlers have managed to convey to the public. If Hatfield's research failed to answer many questions about the extended adolescence Bush himself has always refused to discuss, he did succeed brilliantly in raising many questions that deserve to be addressed but haven't been thus far. The book's most famous accusation - that Bush was arrested for cocaine posession in 1972 and his father got the charges dropped - is more solidly supported than I'd been led to believe. Although Hatfield did fail to produce a source who was willing to confirm the story on the record, he names a number of sources who probably know the answer but - like Bush himself - refuse to confirm or deny it. Additionally, he provides three anonymous sources, not a lone Deep Throat as has been widely reported. The afterword does have a cloak-and-dagger feel to it all the same, and there are typographical and grammatical errors sprinkled throughout the narrative which have helped to make the book easy for Bush supporters to vilify. But for all that, most of what Hatfield reports is well-annotated (in contrast to the original printing) and presented in a non-sensationalistic style. If Hatfield was not the ideal messenger, he at least provided us with an important collection of information that other journalists chose to gloss over or didn't have access to. As Mark Crispin Miller points out in his introduction, the Bush campaign's reaction to the book was just as telling in one sense as the book itself is. If it's inaccurate, why suppress it? Celebrate your right to know. Whatever your politics, read the book and decide for yourself whether or not it's worth believing.
Rating:
Summary: MANDATORY
Review: If everyone read this book, our illegitimate "President" would be impeached. Very well written and well documented. Great book, shameful reality. This book should be mandatory reading for all.
Rating:
Summary: Every American Should Own A Copy of This Book!
Review: If you want to find out more about public officials, start with the books they don't want you to read. Fortunate Son, James Hatfield's swan song, amasses the singlemost informative and chilling overview of Bush the Younger, a man of wealth, privilege, and arrogance nearing Shakespearean proportions. In the wake of its destruction by its original publisher, subsequent revival by Soft Skull Press, as well as the tragic suicide of its author, this book has undergone several revisions. This third revision, featuring a new forward by Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller, is as outstanding as they come, the antithesis to all of the Neoconservative-sanctioned Bush books flooding the market. Approached as a cautionary tale, Fortunate Son's enormous scope is as insightful as it is well-written. An amazing work by an author whose brilliance resonates through every chapter.
Rating:
Summary: Not a condemnation of Bush, just an Expose'
Review: It is sad that the author was hounded (by the Bush's) to a point where he committed suicide in July, 2001, never seing his book published, 9/11, or today's political sniping. (The first printing was burned after the publisher was threatened and paid off.)
This book neither attacks nor praises President Bush. Instead, it is a biography of the events that led Bush to the Oval Office. If you believe only a fraction of the (heavily documented) information contained in these pages, you will wonder what the American public was thinking when he became President.
Easy reading, but you won't want to put it down.
An excellent choice (to go with this book) might be "Blinded by the Right" or "The Republican Noise Machine", both by David Brock.
Rating:
Summary: A very good look at what's running the White House
Review: The problem with writing a biography of George W. Bush is that it won't be nice. The details of his life leave no choice. Fortunate Son puts all this on display. It shows a man who says the right things while doing whatever benefits him. The list of contradictions is as plain as day. Here are a few. In April of 1999 George blamed the film industry for desensitizing people to violence. Between 1983 and 1993 he was a paid director for Silver Screen Management. They arrange for investment in films. Twenty-one of the films they arranged financing for were R-rated. That was due to the violence they depicted. Arlington politico's passed legislation that allowed the Arlington Sports Facility Development Authority to seize land. It was turned over to the Rangers for development. As a minority owner of the team George was close to these people. As Governor he later pulled the teeth from those laws. His run for Governor was based on a platform of issues he misrepresented. His working existence is a series of shady business deals. His morality is rife with hypocrisy. The book is filled with examples of this. Hatfield's research begs for more questions to be asked too. In 1978 George ran for the Congressional riding of Midland, Texas. It came out that 61% of his financial backing came from outside that riding. Most of it was from big business interests. Why? At that point George had nothing behind him (apart from the family name) to warrant that support. It was there though. The records prove it. It was revelations like this that got J. H. Hatfield in trouble with the upper echelon of the Republican Party (to say nothing of their supporters). He hadn't started out with intentions of discrediting Bush. If anything it was the opposite; his sympathetic writing style makes that clear. The book is well written. The information is concise. Hatfield doesn't condemn. He just reports the facts. He had avoided what he couldn't prove. His coverage of the (possible) fiasco during the Air Guard tenure had been sparse. There's no mention of the ties between the Bush and Hinckley families either. Hatfield would have found those. He left them alone though. It was only after attacks on his credibility that he did some more research. Then he found the details of the cocaine bust. It's hard to say how much more he'd have found had he lived. It's even harder to guess how much he would have proven. There seems to be plenty there. Still, what he found was more than enough. It produced a very important book. Everyone should read it.
Rating:
Summary: Relevant Now More Than Ever
Review: The story of George W. Bush from his pre-natal family history up through the 2000 presidential election. Though a big deal is made of Dub-yah's alcoholism and cocaine use, this book raises many other troubling questions about the Bush family's politics, with alleged connections to Nazi Germany, the KKK and even the Bin Laden family. Perhaps more troubling is the portrait painted of George Junior himself: a cocky, spoiled brat with a bad temper and a sense of righteous entitlement.
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