Betty White Books

I found this book contained too many unnecessary details, especially on the vineyards in Nappa Valley. I was reading it for entertainment; NOT to find out how to produce and bottle wine. The book did have a good ending though! Overall = there's better books out there to waste your time on this one!

this book is so good you are the best aurthur i've read

This book was supposed to have been published in 2001. I felt as if I was reading a book published in the 40's or 50's. The characters were not believable at all. People in England do not talk like this in the 2000's. Waste of my money. I would have liked to have given it 0 star (but couldn't) due to how too old-fashion the whole writing was for the year 2000.

Back Cover description: A business proposal�or more? Meeting Dr. Roele van Dyke was a blessing for Emma Dawson. He always seemed to go out of his way to make her happy, and she couldn�t imagine life without him�.
And when the time came for Roele to return to Amsterdam permanently, he knew he couldn�t leave Emma behind. So he offered her a job at his surgery. Emma was in love and simply couldn�t refuse. But did Roele want Emma to be his secretary or his wife?

A nice, pleasant Betty Neels story. Emma is not a nurse; she is taking care of her whiny, selfish mother. The mother is almost too much to take, but thankfully she is gone by the halfway point. Emma has no skills, so it is not easy for her to get jobs she can make money at. Roele is in love with her by page 72. The rest of the book follows along the same route that Ms. Neels always uses, but hey�it�s why I read these

Miss Neels has always written a special way, that is what makes her books so very enjoyable. If you are wanting sex and drama, look else where. But for soft comfortable romance Miss Neels stands alone. She has been saddly missed.

This book made no real effort to consider the alchemy of the Ford marriage - looking at and attempting to analyze the private and personal influence of the First Lady on the President - it simply deals with the face value of public reaction. Thus is severely underrates the influence of Betty Ford. There is a lack of any human depth to this work and in attempting to be dry and objective, entirely loses what was the unique kind of power that First Ladies like Betty Ford can have - different no doubt than those who undertake specific legislative agendas, but one that the public responded to. The wrong author for a great subject.

Because the current Republican first lady easily can double as an extra in a "Stepford Wives" film, we must not forget that she is only one, and certainly does not reflect all her predecessors within either the White House institution or the Republican Party. Betty Ford certainly proved that.

John Robert Greene's biography of Betty Ford does justice to a woman who was so clearly ahead of her time, and certainly not afraid to admit it either. Whether people love or hate her, they ultimately admit that Betty Ford has ideas of her own. Greene, a historian, previously authored biographies on George H.W. Bush and (appropriately) Gerald Ford.

After Spiro T. Agnew and Richard Nixon's resignations, Gerald Ford unexpectedly became the nation's president. Although he is relatively liberal by current Republican standards (which was issue of contention in the 1976 Republican primary) Ford was conservative when compared to his own wife.

Even though she was from the World War II era generation---who weren't supposed to support women's liberation, Ford instead championed the Equal Rights Amendment and gave public thanks that abortion was `brought out of the back woods' in interviews which were undoubtedly path-breaking in their own day.

In a time when the new right was preparing for the Reagan and Bush eras, Betty Ford was a true lightning rod. Effectively defusing an idea that only `radicals' or `wide eyed youth' wanted policy AND cultural changes, she helped to successfully infuse women's rights with a public `respectability' that several other public female supporters were not able to achieve in 1974-1976. Being First Lady gave Mrs. Ford the ability to draw middle America to the very social movements which they otherwise might have feared.

For instance, after finding a lump in her own breast, Mrs. Ford encouraged other women to talk about breast cancer---and promoted the early detection which is now commonplace in America. Because then prevailing sentiment had been to `keep quiet' and attempt treating cancer in later and ultimately more difficult stages, Mrs. Ford has saved many women's lives. When compared against the Republican Party's subsequent and current `pro-family' ideology which actually attempts hiding frank discussions of human anatomy, her actions truly were `pro-life'.

For all its celebration, the book does pointedly acknowledge that Ford had a substance abuse problem. Again turning personal experience into public enlightenment/growth, Ford lent her name to the Betty Ford treatment center in California. If the center has subsequently become the stuff of pop culture, it also has humanized first ladies; they experience problems AND also have opinions how to end those problems.

Even if she was never actually a co-president and was generally content as First Lady, Betty Ford had ultimately opened the door for successors Rosalyn Carter and Hillary Rodham Clinton to increase the public role in ways which Eleanor Roosevelt had only dreamt about. This book is recommended for historians and political scientists, particularly those interested in theories about the power and influence of First Ladies on public policy.

This book is light, easy reading, but really boring. Betty tells the story of her remarkable career but the book is lacking. Where is the dish? Where are the juicy parts? Betty writes as if it is one big happy press release. She likes everything and everybody. Everything is hunky-dorey. She never minded getting fired from jobs, she never minded being uprooted, she never minded long, tedious work hours. Betty drops names of some of the most famous people in the world and barely comments on them. She gives her meeting with the Queen Mother one sentence in the whole book! She was married to Allen Ludden for 18 years, but until she mentions this toward the end of the book, the reader doesn't even realize that all of their experiences took place over that length of time. She was best friends with Mary Tyler Moore and her husband Grant Tinker and although she tells of many anicdotes, nothing delves very deeply. Betty was on two classic TV shows of all times, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "The Golden Girls", yet she glosses over these experiences and doesn't go into any details about any of it. Apparently Betty's life experience is not able to fit into one book and trying to fit it in one book makes it all seem like an outline rather than a story. Readers will look for some juicy "Mary Tyler Moore Show" stories and some backstage gossip about "The Golden Girls", but they will not find that. They will get Betty's ramblings and squeeky clean attitude about not saying anything if you dont have anything nice to say.... apparently she had nothing nice to say so she glossed over much of her life. I really would have loved to know how she truly felt about her coworkers and how they interacted on and off stage. Some funny "blooper" moments would have been great and some real life gossip would make her seem more human. I love Betty White, I just didn't get all I thought I would from this book. But Betty truly is a Golden Girl, she has done it all