Maureen Dowd Book Out This Week

By: E&P Staff Maureen Dowd's fans and foes, who may lament the small doses of her New York Times opinion column they get to peruse each week, are in for a bonanza starting Thursday, when her first book, "Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk," clocking in at 523 pages, gets its official launch.

The book, which features on its cover a Pat Oliphant drawing of President Bush in an oversized cowboy hat in front of a weed-choked White House, has already reached #142 on the amazon.com sales charts. It collects over 100 of her columns organized to flesh out her concept of the Bizarro world suggested by her title ("It's their reality. We just live and die in it"). It also features a newly written opening essay.

Typical Dowd appraisal of Bush: "All presidents are in a bubble, but the boy king was so insulated he was in a thermos." But she also reflects on the need for a drug called "Gorzac," needed to counter nausea when former Vice President Al Gore appears on TV promising to "let it rip."

The amazon review praises the book, which is published by Putnam, but adds that "one occasionally wishes she'd quit kidding around and say something substantive." Publishers Weekly called Dowd "as scathingly funny as she is stingingly succinct."