Bush's autobiography, "A Charge to Keep," is the worst read of the three, devoid of all detail about what makes Bush's life mildly intriguing: his temper, his years of rowdy drunkenness, his unresolved relationship with his father, the undercurrent of sadness and self-destructiveness that may well spring (we'll never know for sure; the Bushes are hostile to "the couch") from the early death of his sister. The book reads like most inspirational bestsellers by famous people on the back slope of their careers -- former President Jimmy Carter, Children's Defense Fund president Marion Wright Edelman, Gen. Colin Powell -- as a collection of easy-listening observations best left on the bedside table for a night when sleep is elusive and there's nothing on TV. Try this:

Faith, family and friends ... They guided my father during twelve years as president and vice president; they are the ways by which ultimately, I believe, all of our lives will be measured ... I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans. Politics is a fickle business. Polls change. Today's friend is tomorrow's adversary. People lavish praise and attention. Many times it is genuine; sometimes it is not. Yet I build my life on a foundation that will not shift. My faith frees me.

And so on. Written by Bush's communications director, Karen Hughes, it skates over the nomadic period between his graduation from Yale and his entry into Harvard Business School in just a few pages. Most of those pages are devoted to his flyboy years in the Texas Air National Guard. Bush spends just a few sparse pages on his entrepreneurial years, a time when old friends from Midland just happened to hook him up with the right people at the right time to help him make his fortune.

And yet, from all three books, a picture of Bush's early life emerges. He opens "Charge," after a meandering introduction, with a stark and moving picture of the day his sister Robin died of leukemia. By his own account and others, it was the trauma of his otherwise happy childhood. He didn't know she was dying beforehand, though his parents did, and his high-WASP family didn't discuss her death much afterward, either. But he took it hard, as did his mother, and would be plagued by nightmares for years.

Later, at Andover, asked to write a paper about an "emotional experience" -- only Minutaglio's book reveals the topic he chose was Robin's death -- Bush struggled to find a synonym for the overused word "tears" and came up with "lacerates" in his thesaurus. He described "lacerates running down my cheeks," causing what must have been a stone-hearted teacher to flunk him.

Of course, Bush's attendance at cold-blooded Andover was a key stepping stone on his path to the presidency. When the Bush family moved from Midland to Houston, George W. had gone to the tony Kincaid school, known as the place for rich kids who couldn't get into the more rigorous St. John's. East Coast privilege obviously didn't yet cut mustard in Houston, but it certainly did at Andover, where the mediocre young Bush was accepted, like Bushes before him, despite failing to distinguish himself intellectually. And so it would go at Yale, too -- where he was a solid C student -- and at Harvard Business School.

Through pop foreign-policy quizzes and hapless attempts to list the books he's read, a question continues to dog Bush: Is he stupid? Time magazine obtained his SAT scores, and it pains me to admit they're exactly the same as mine, only inverted -- he got 660 in math and 540 in verbal, while I got the high score on verbal. (Of course I marched off proudly to the University of Wisconsin without a thought about Yale; those weren't Ivy League scores even in the '60s and '70s.)

Bush mostly thrived at Yale, among other legacy admissions and his frat-boy buddies. But he kept up his Houston roots, becoming engaged to Cathy Wolfson, a brainy coed at Houston's Rice University, though the pair would never marry. The Hatfield book insists their trouble stemmed from the Bush family's distaste for her Jewish stepfather (which the Bushes denied); Minutaglio, typically, underplays the story, but does reveal that the girl's social status suffered due to "whispers" about her "merchant" roots, and that while the elder George Bush liked to play matchmaker, he never matched his son up with the wealthy and beautiful Wolfson. Bush himself devotes only one sentence to their romance.

In "Charge," he describes his time at Yale as a lost age of innocence, just before the anti-war and civil rights movements ignited the nation's campuses. This is silly, of course -- those were the years of the Watts riots and other urban uprisings. While Bush was there, a majority of Yale students signed an anti-war petition, and the university's black student union staged a two-day class boycott. He missed all of it. He did manage to rouse himself to protest one social outrage: the increasing attacks on fraternities, especially on their sadistic hazing rituals. He was first quoted in the New York Times in 1967, defending DKE's practice of branding new pledges. The resulting mark "resembled a cigarette burn," Bush told the Times.

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