The Real George W.

For years now, people have been trying to pigeonhole George W. Bush. When he first ran for the presidency, they dismissed him as “Shrub,” a know-nothing frat boy pushed onto the stage by his daddy’s rich friends to front for the oil industry. After he entered the White House, they painted him as the “Toxic Texan,” the shoot-from-the-lip, cowboy president determined to impose a new Yankee imperium on an unwilling world.

Who is the real George Bush? The 43rd president has become such a polarizing figure—so loathed, so patronized, so caricatured—that it is hard to get a grip on the man behind the cardboard cutout. Where did he come from? How does he think? How does he wield power? Perhaps most important, what are his views on the world outside the United States and Washington’s role in it?

Alexander Moens’s book is an even-handed, dispassionate look at the real George Bush. He has no obvious bias about his subject, although Moens, who teaches at Vancouver’s...