Bill Minutaglio tells the W. story mostly in the context of the Bush family, which strikes me as the right strategy. Bush himself likes to put forward a simple version of his life, but the truth is more interesting: Not just the West Texas childhood, but the adolescence shuttling back and forth from Houston to Andover, etc. First Son gives a sense of the privileges of a family like Bush clan, but also a sense of the expectations. Along the way Minutaglio provides a bit of a crash course on Texas politics, also useful in understanding Bush, his allies, and his enemies. The result is a story told in a fairly straightforward, nearly newspaperish style, and while it's slightly repetitive, the underlying material is good enough to make it a quick and engaging (if not very deep) read. Minutaglio seems fairly determined not to make any overt judgments about his subject, so the book ends up a sort of Rorschach test. It may reinforce whatever views on Bush you have, but I doubt it will change many minds. It's not a classic, and I doubt this will be the last word on Bush, but First Son is a good distillation of the W. story so far.

I'm no expert on McMurtry, but he got my interest with that juxtaposition in the title: Like a lot of people, I know about Walter Benjamin from having read him a bit in college, and like any native Texan, I know something about Dairy Queen, too. On one level the link is simple. McMurtry says the book has its origins in the day back in 1980 when he was sitting at a Dairy Queen in West Texas reading Benjamin's "Storyteller" essay. This becomes the jumping off point for McMurtry's observations about story telling, the West, book-scouting, writing, reading, cowboys, movies, nostalgia, and the other side of 60. Benjamin is a bit of a fleeting presence, though at one point McMurtry does observe that Benjamin's greatness was diffused, a lot small bursts of light rather than a single supernova-sized work. This book is similar, I think. It's a book of ruminations, which sounds faintly pejorative, but I don't think the book greater in its parts than in its sum. In fact I'm not sure I could say what the sum is, since McMurtry passingly asserts that this is no memoir. I guess I'm inclined to disagree with him on that. If this isn't a self portrait per se, it's at least a sketch of the kind of life and intelligence one needs to be authoritative and at ease (not merely acquainted, like me) with the cosmopolitan and the down-home, Benjamin and Dairy Queen.