Rating: 
Summary: Good, Entertaining Read
Review: "No Way to Treat a First Lady" is an amusing read for the few hours it will take you to finish it. This isn't literary fiction; you won't receive any interesting revelations about life and love.
The heroine, Elizabeth Tyler MacMann, is accused of killing her husband, Kenneth Kemble MacMann, war hero and President of the United States. Boyce "Shameless" Baylor is her lawyer and jilted fiancé-she left him twenty-five years ago for the man who would become president. There are plenty of characters, including the actress/mistress/singer/Middle East peace advocate, a renegade spy, and underworld gangsters.
Buckley pokes fun of the media, the government, the legal system, and the entertainment industry. With a few clever witticisms and improbable twists, the novel makes its way through the "Trial of the Millennium" until the all the plot threads tie up neatly in the end.
I'd recommend "No Way to Treat a First Lady" for a few hours entertainment and not much else.
Rating:
Summary: Good, Entertaining Read
Review: "No Way to Treat a First Lady" is an amusing read for the few hours it will take you to finish it. This isn't literary fiction; you won't receive any interesting revelations about life and love.
The heroine, Elizabeth Tyler MacMann, is accused of killing her husband, Kenneth Kemble MacMann, war hero and President of the United States. Boyce "Shameless" Baylor is her lawyer and jilted fiancé-she left him twenty-five years ago for the man who would become president. There are plenty of characters, including the actress/mistress/singer/Middle East peace advocate, a renegade spy, and underworld gangsters.
Buckley pokes fun of the media, the government, the legal system, and the entertainment industry. With a few clever witticisms and improbable twists, the novel makes its way through the "Trial of the Millennium" until the all the plot threads tie up neatly in the end.
I'd recommend "No Way to Treat a First Lady" for a few hours entertainment and not much else.
Rating: 
Summary: A delightful satire
Review: A book that skewers lawyers, the media culture and the Washington power-elite. A delightful satire and fun read.
Rating:
Summary: Like a warm shower
Review: Author Christopher Buckley, whose razor wit somehow transformed a spokesman for the tobacco industry a sympathetic protagonist in Thank You For Smoking, sets his sites on the alleged assassination of the president in No Way To Treat A First Lady. What's next? A comedic treatment of domestic abuse or drug addiction?Whatever it is, based on the two efforts of Mr. Buckley I have read so far, it is bound to be an entertaining and intelligent. This time around, Mr. Buckely sets up fictional circumstances that hilariously skewer the scandals surrounding Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Barbara Streisand, Johnny Cochran and OJ Simpson, Marc Rich, Monica Lewinsky, and the American legal system. Don't be surprised to find yourself laughing, loudly and often. A friend of mine calls this kind of book a "warm shower" -- it's nice when you're in it, he says, but the good feeling doesn't last long once you step out onto the bathmat. It's a characterization I can't deny, but I'll say that this warm shower is better than most. It won't force you to ask yourself important questions, and it won't affect the way you see the world. But as an easy-to-read story that manages to keep the pages turning without insulting anyone's intelligence, it's hard to beat.
Rating: 
Summary: No way to treat your intelligent audience
Review: Big disappointment. It reads as if the author, having gotten this great IDEA for a novel--and it IS a great idea--spent a few days jotting it down and sold it. If the plot were brilliant, you might forgive the implausible characters. If the characterizations were illuminating, you might forgive the implausible plot. If the prose were fantastically witty you might forgive everything. But *No Way* falls short by every measure. I picked it up because Buckley's essays in *Wry Martinis* are funny and smart. Wish I'd stuck to his essays.
Rating:
Summary: "about the author"
Review: Book is often "laugh-out-loud" funny, which I have come to expect from Christopher Buckley. I don't know whether he or the publisher (Random House) is responsible for the back flap information "About the Author" but I suspect Random House and Christopher Buckley would like to get that column changed in view of the recent space shuttle disaster. It is just too joker for it's own good.
Rating: 
Summary: Laugh Out Loud Funny
Review: Buckley does it again! What a funny book. He artfully skewers lawyers, politicians, and the media. I couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Another funny book by Buckley
Review: Buckley has written seven or eight books at this point, and this is the fourth I've read by him, and it's also a very funny book. Sometimes an author can produce a winning book by combining two equally wayward ideas, even if they've been done separately before, and that's what Buckley has done here. It's sort of like what was done with the book and subsequently for the movie, "The English Patient," which was sort of a combination of "The Elephant Man" and "Lawrence of Arabia," although that was obviously a serious story and Buckley's book is satire. However, this wacky union of circumstances works well and as a result Buckley has written another very funny book. The book is obviously inspired by the combination of the Clinton Presidency, with its sex scandals, and the O.J. Simpson "Trial of the Century." The president dies under suspicious circumstances, and the President's wife get arrested, presumably for finally murdering him for his infidelities. The book mostly deals with the legal antics involved in the "Trial of Millenium," as the country's greatest, not to mention the most shameless and flamboyant, attorney, pulls out every trick in the book to try to get the first lady off--in more ways than one. Buckley builds the courtroom and outside-the-courtroom dramas up to a very funny and satisfying climax. I think Buckley is the funniest observer and writer I've seen yet on the Washington political scene. If you liked his Little Green Men and Thank You for Smoking, two of the funniest books I've read in the humour and satire genre, you'll like this book too, and I'd actually give it 4.5 stars if I could.
Rating:
Summary: witty, quick-moving, political farce
Review: Buckley's ridicule of trial attorneys and politicians is hilarious and apt but never bitter. This is a very enjoyable read, as was his _Thank You for Smoking_.
Rating:
Summary: Hang the First Lady
Review: Christopher Buckley has produced another comic masterpiece, this time placing the Washington culture, lawyer-dom, TV talking heads, and Clintonesque vices squarely in his cross-hairs. Christopher Buckley seems to get no press or respect, but he has snuck up on us, nearly unannounced as the best satirist of this generation. Take this one to the beach and laugh out loud. A sitting President wakes up dead one spring morning after a late night romp with an actress turned Middle East peace advocate, and a resulting bump on the head by a suspicious and very upset wife. Although the evidence seems weak initially, the Attorney General elects to prosecute the First Lady for murder. She brings in a $1000 per hour litigator, who also happens to be an ex-boyfriend from law school. Turns out the First Lady dumped the attorney for a war hero law student, who later becomes the philandering Commander in Chief. Clearly, this is not based on the Clintons as Clinton was never a war hero, more like the opposite, and it is hard to imagine Hillary having multiple male suiters. Then things get really crazy, with renewed romances and unexpected consequences, charges of jury tampering, false evidence, and defendants determined to not only testify when it seems un-neccesary and risky, but to represent themselves. When you think you have it figured out, here come the international financiers immersed in deals with the Chinese, civil war between the FBI and the CIA, and shadowy fugitive ex-agents with stories of espionage to tell that make Watergate look truly irrelevant.
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