美国前第一夫人劳拉•布什新出版的回忆录《心里话》(Spoken From the Heart)以其披露的许多"大内秘闻"吸引了媒体关注。英国《卫报》28日报道，劳拉在回忆录中说，她和丈夫小布什2008年赴德国出席八国集团峰会时，可能被人下了毒。劳拉说，当时布什和她及他们的几名随从都出现了胃部不适。2008年6月7日布什夫妇出席了峰会的晚宴，第二天早晨布什就感到不适。

《纽约时报》 援引劳拉在回忆录中的话说，当美国代表团的一些人出现身体不适后，美国特勤人员曾被招来进行调查，但医生们却认为这不过是病毒感染。劳拉在回忆录中写道，我们从未听说其他与会代表团中也有人出现了身体不适，或者是否我们令人费解地成为了唯一染病的代表团。
Laura Bush's new memoir, "Spoken From the Heart," is really two books. The first is a deeply felt, keenly observed account of her childhood and youth in Texas - an account that captures a time and place with exactingemotionalprecision and that demonstrates how Mrs. Bush's lifelong love of books has imprinted her imagination. The second book is a thoroughlyconventional autobiography by a politician's wife - a rote recitation of travel, public appearances and meetings with foreign dignitaries that sheds not the faintest new light on the presidency of the author's husband, George W. Bush.

Throughout her tenure in the White House, Laura Bush was often described in faintly condescending terms as an old-fashioned first lady, as "the perfect wife," as the anti-Hillary who "knows her place" and wanted only to stand by her man. At worst, she was described as a Stepford wife with a faintly medicated aura; at best, as a gracious foil to her blustering frat boy of a husband. Commentators found it hard to believe that her favorite book was "The Brothers Karamazov," or if they did, they wondered what she was doing married to that language-mangling gut player, George W.

In "Spoken From the Heart" (which was written with Lyric Winik, "who helped me put my story into words"), Mrs. Bush acknowledges the role playing required of a political spouse. On election night, she writes, you are to wear "the look of radiantrelief at victory or brave composure at defeat." And the second half of this volume is filled with the sort of spin and canned platitudes common in political autobiographies.

There are a few crumbs of political interest strewn along the way: The usually charitable Mrs. Bush chastises the Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for their "nasty personal criticisms of George," and she writes that she has often wondered if Jacques Chirac of France or Gerhard Schröder of Germany "could have done more" to prevent the Iraq war, "if one of them could have persuaded Saddam to go into exile, if they could have conveyed that the United States was not bluffing."

For the most part, however, the White House portions of this book feel carefully prepared and vetted: Mrs. Bush lays out a predictable defense of her husband's decision to invade Iraq and his decision not to visit New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, and she offers only the blandest portraits of administration figures like Dick Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. In these chapters there is no daylight between Laura Bush and her highly groomed role as first lady.

The opening sections of this book, however, are as revealing and evocative as the later ones are guarded. Writing with impressive recall, Mrs. Bush conjures her hometown, Midland, Tex., with enormous detail, lyricism and feeling. It's a small town in the 1950s and early 60s, when children looked forward to ice cream sundaes and pony rides, and teenagers hung out at drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants.

The world is part "The Last Picture Show" and part "American Graffiti," but less sophisticated - a place where people gather the tumbleweeds that blow through town in the winter, tie them into threes and spray "them with white flocking to make desert snowmen for their lawns." A place where people want houses with familiar floor plans ("a living room at the front, a den behind it, and a hallway with three bedrooms") and think nothing of driving six hours to Dallas or El Paso for something to do.

"It was easy perhaps to be sad in Midland," Mrs. Bush writes, "sad from loss, sad from loneliness. 'Terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness' were the painter Georgia O'Keeffe's double-edged words about the Texas desert plains, which I read years later, after I was grown."

Mrs. Bush adds that life with her parents was "not sad," but a sense of loss and loneliness does blow through her descriptions of her childhood. Her mother had three miscarriages, and those "lost babies" haunted the young Laura. She says she knew how much her father wanted a son, and she longed for siblings when she found herself a solitary "child among the throngs at a crowdedamusement park." Instead there were solo picnics in the park over on the next street and hours spent reading books like Nancy Drew, whom she identified with as another only child.

A terrible car accident on the night of Nov. 6, 1963, when Laura was 17, would come close to derailing her life. On the way to the movies with a friend, she ran through a stop sign and crashed into another car; the other driver, a good friend from school named Mike Douglas, was killed. Mrs. Bush rarely spoke of the accident in later years (it surfaced briefly in the national news media during her husband's first run for the White House), but she offers here a remarkably raw and searing account of what happened.

"I can never absolve myself of the guilt," she writes. "And the guilt isn't simply from Mike dying. The guilt is from all the implications, from the way those few seconds spun out and enfolded so many other lives. The reverberations seem to go on forever, like the ripples from an unsinkable stone."

Mrs. Bush says she lost her faith "that November, lost it for many, many years." She was always the model-student type who strived not to disappoint, and the accident and her poor eyesight (corrected with glasses only in the second grade) seem to have intensified her sense of caution and love of order. She is someone who organized the books in one of her houses by the Dewey decimal system and writes here that she not only dislikes "clutter and its complications," but is also "wary of the responsibility of too many things."

It was with a sense of relief, then, that Mrs. Bush returned to private life in Texas in 2009. "Sometime during that first spring and summer back in Texas, I began to feel the buoyancy of my own newfound freedom," she writes at the end of this odd and poignant book. "After nearly eight years of hypervigilance, of watching for the next danger or tragedy that might be coming, I could at last exhale. I could simply be."

• keenly [´ki:nli] ad.敏锐地；强烈地 (初中英语单词)
• account [ə´kaunt] vi.说明 vt.认为 n.帐目 (初中英语单词)
• childhood [´tʃaildhud] n.幼年(时代)；早期 (初中英语单词)
• emotional [i´məuʃənəl] a.易动感情的；情感的 (初中英语单词)
• imagination [i,mædʒi´neiʃən] n.想象(力) (初中英语单词)
• thoroughly [´θʌrəli] ad.完全地，彻底地 (初中英语单词)
• old-fashioned [´əuld´feʃənd] a.老式的；过时的 (初中英语单词)
• gracious [´greiʃəs] a.和蔼可亲的；任慈的 (初中英语单词)
• player [´pleiə] n.游戏的人；选手 (初中英语单词)
• election [i´lekʃən] n.选举；选择 (初中英语单词)
• relief [ri´li:f] n.救济；援救；减轻 (初中英语单词)
• victory [´viktəri] n.胜利，战胜 (初中英语单词)
• volume [´vɔlju:m, ´vɑljəm] n.卷；书籍；体积；容量 (初中英语单词)
• invade [in´veid] vt.侵入；打扰；充满 (初中英语单词)
• administration [əd,minis´treiʃən] n.管理(事务等)；经营 (初中英语单词)
• daylight [´deilait] n.日光；黎明 (初中英语单词)
• opening [´əupəniŋ] n.开放；开端 a.开始的 (初中英语单词)
• writing [´raitiŋ] n.书写；写作；书法 (初中英语单词)
• enormous [i´nɔ:məs] a.巨大地，很，极 (初中英语单词)
• painter [´peintə] n.画家；(油)漆工 (初中英语单词)
• haunted [´hɔ:tid] a.常出现鬼的，闹鬼的 (初中英语单词)
• amusement [ə´mju:zmənt] n.娱乐；文娱设施 (初中英语单词)
• reading [´ri:diŋ] n.(阅)读；朗读；读物 (初中英语单词)
• rarely [´reəli] ad.难得；非凡地 (初中英语单词)
• briefly [´bri:fli] ad.简短地；简略地 (初中英语单词)
• disappoint [,disə´pɔint] vt.使失望；使....落空 (初中英语单词)
• system [´sistəm] n.系统，体系，制度 (初中英语单词)
• responsibility [ri,spɔnsə´biliti] n.责任(心)；职责；任务 (初中英语单词)
• tragedy [´trædʒidi] n.悲剧；惨案；灾难 (初中英语单词)
• presidency [´prezidənsi] n.总统的职位(任期) (高中英语单词)
• faintly [´feintli] ad.微弱地，软弱无力的 (高中英语单词)
• radiant [´reidiənt] a.发光的 n.光源(体) (高中英语单词)
• strewn [stru:n] strew的过去分词 (高中英语单词)
• impressive [im´presiv] a.给人深刻印象的 (高中英语单词)
• loneliness [´ləunliniz] n.孤独，寂寞 (高中英语单词)
• georgia [´dʒɔ:dʒjə] n.乔治亚 (高中英语单词)
• solitary [´sɔlitəri] a.独居的；孤独的 (高中英语单词)
• crowded [´kraudid] a.充(拥)满了的 (高中英语单词)
• caution [´kɔ:ʃən] n.&vt.小心；告诫；警告 (高中英语单词)
• precision [pri´siʒən] n.精密(度) a.精确的 (英语四级单词)
• conventional [kən´venʃənəl] a.常规的；协定的 (英语四级单词)
• composure [kəm´pəuʒə] n.镇静，沉着 (英语四级单词)
• charitable [´tʃæritəbəl] a.仁爱的；慈善的 (英语四级单词)
• orleans [ɔ:´liənz] n.奥尔良 (英语四级单词)
• dallas [´dæləs] n.达拉斯 (英语四级单词)
• remarkably [ri´mɑ:kəbli] ad.非凡地；显著地 (英语四级单词)
• memoir [´memwɑ:] n.回忆录；传记 (英语六级单词)
• exacting [ig´zæktiŋ] a.苛求的；严格的 (英语六级单词)
• lifelong [´laiflɔŋ] a.终生的 (英语六级单词)
• spouse [spauz] n.配偶 (英语六级单词)
• hallway [´hɔ:lwei] n.(美)门厅，过道 (英语六级单词)
• absolve [əb´zɔlv] vt.免除；赦免 (英语六级单词)
• exhale [eks´heil] v.散出，吐出；蒸发 (英语六级单词)