George W. Bush remains a highly visible and controversial figure in the contemporary imagination, even as President Obama's administration works hard to reverse many of the previous administration's policies. Millions of Americans have very strong feelings about Bush, and now that he has mostly stepped off the world stage, many of them are wondering 'What was that all about?!' Dan McAdams' book offers a psychological analysis of the former president, one of the first to offer a post-Bush-Administration analysis of Bush, as well as the first biography of him to draw systematically from personality science to analyze his life. McAdams, an international leader in personality psychology and the narrative study of lives, analyzes three layers of Bush's personality - (1) his dispositional traits, (2) the life goals and personal projects he pursued, and (3) the story he constructed to make sense of his own life - to reveal the psychological dynamics that account for Bush's characteristic behavioral patterns. McAdams develops his argument over five chapters, moving successively through each of these three layers. Rather than progressing chronologically, McAdams focuses on specific events in Bush's life, such as the death of his sister at age 7, his commitment to sobriety on his 40th birthday, and his reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Although there are many popular biographies of George W. Bush, including those that purport to use psychobiographical methods, McAdams' book is the first to provide a true psychological analysis that uses both established theories and the latest methods and research results from psychology to understand Bush's life. Short and focused, written in an engaging, non-technical style that should appeal to a wide readership, this book has considerable appeal both to psychologists, and the educated lay public.