Former first lady Laura Bush has spent her time away from Washington producing an autobiography that is clearly the product of a teacher, librarian and faithful wife. Comprehensive and well-researched, "Spoken From the Heart" nevertheless reads like a labor of duty more than love.

Early in her story, Mrs. Bush confesses that she doesn't like surprises. She must be right. There are few to be found here, despite the book's heft.

Spoken From the Heart

By Laura Bush

Scribner

456 pages, $30

Instead, Mrs. Bush, with writing help from journalist Lyric Winik, delivers a workmanlike chronicle of a fairly generic mid-20th century middle-class childhood in a dusty Texas town, followed by a decade of teaching and library work before the whirlwind courtship that resulted in her marriage to George W. Bush.

The rest, as we say, is history. Much of it, we already know.

But, for the first time, she writes in detail of the night, when she was 17, that she ran a stop sign and hit a car driven by a high school friend, killing him. She didn't go to his funeral, or ever talk to his parents.

The guilt, she says, still haunts her. But, she writes, "I already knew that the 'what ifs' are fruitless. It's a futile exercise."

Much later, she returns to that theme when supporting her husband's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. As is now known, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction or connection to the 9/11 terror attacks. Still, her hindsight remains rosy:

"Can anyone truly say that the world was a better place and Iraq a better nation with Saddam Hussein in power?" she wonders. "Or that it would not have become a full-fledged terrorist haven? ... No one can say for certain what would have happened had a different path been taken."

The tone of the book alters after the attacks, as the family settles into an unsettled Washington life. We get more "scenarios," but few telling anecdotes or conversations. The government goes into an almost constant state of alert, but Laura Bush suddenly transitions into descriptions of updating and renovating the White House.

By the end, we know quite a lot about the White House china, wallpaper and Christmas cards. We know nearly nothing about the Bushes' day-to-day life, or interactions with their staff and other officials, although most are described as wonderful workers and dear friends. We do learn that Condi Rice was like family; her predecessor at the State Department Colin Powell shows up barely long enough to meet Oprah and her dear friend Gayle King.

The early chapters, when she is still little Laura Welch, are the most revealing.

This kind of personal detail, not found later, gives the chapters of her girlhood in Midland, Texas, a freshness and they seem more genuine. Her father gambled, drank and smoked (so did she as a teen and in college), and he even sold their home one time to someone who knocked on the door with an offer. But, he also came home for lunch most days, took her and her mother on vacations and refused to own a gun.

Harold Welch made that decision when he was in Europe in World War II, when he was among the first Americans to enter the concentration camps. He kept photos of those days in a cigar box, but he didn't often talk about it.

Nor did her mother discuss or openly mourn the three other babies she carried but lost, none living more than a few days. "In those times, in West Texas, in the 1950s, we did not talk about those things," Mrs. Bush writes.

In this way, she explains much about how she and her husband coped with events to come. "Those who live [in West Texas] are direct and blunt to the point of hurt sometimes. There is no time for artifice; it looks and sounds ridiculous amid the barren landscape."

That stoic attitude infuses "Spoken from the Heart." Mrs. Bush has proven herself over the years to be a gracious hostess, loving wife, and caring woman. Her causes have been many: literacy, education, fighting AIDS in Africa, speaking out for rights of Afghan women. In presenting her White House years, these are the things she focuses on and remembers, but more as a list than a life.

Indeed, the later chapters have much of the feel of a datebook, with names dutifully dropped in for the record. On the personal level, she is more and more cautious in her remembrances once she meets George Bush and enters political life.

The two were married three months after they were introduced by friends in Midland in 1977. She offers no explanation for the rush, other than at that particular moment, "We were not looking for someone to date, but for someone with whom to share a life, for the rest of our lives."

Although Laura as an only child often wished for siblings of her own, she doesn't devote much space here to large family she married into. Her father-in-law become Gampy, her mother-in-law is Bar, and Bar is credited for her acerbic tongue and love for her children.

It wasn't until 10 years later, when George W. was helping with his father's presidential campaign, that Laura began to bond with her in-laws, and sympathize. She does relate to Bar's stress at the chaotic mass of the family gatherings in Kennebunkport:

"I look back now through album photographs, at everyone grouped together smiling gamely for the camera, and someone always looks as if he or she is about to cry. In a number of photos, the person on the verge of tears is Bar."

Also during that time, Laura was facing her husband's drinking problem. She takes a stand, but not the famous "It's Jim Beam or me" one. She didn't think his drinking was funny, "And I told him so," she writes. "And I let him know that I thought he could be a better man."

In the end, it was George's decision to quit, after a weekend binge with friends. "There had been many drunken and half-drunken weekends, there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about this one, except that it was one weekend too many," she writes.

If there were other problems in their marriage, they don't show up in this book.

She glosses quickly over Bush's two terms as governor of Texas, after pointing out his decision to run came almost immediately after his father left the White House for good.

"As painful as it was for his family, George H.W. Bush's loss had finally freed his own children to say what they thought and to go after their own objectives." (At the same time, Jeb Bush ran for governor of Florida for the first time, but lost.)

The 2000 presidential election campaign comes across as energizing, exhausting and never-ending. The fact that some opposed to George Bush had trouble accepting the adjudicated results puzzles her, as she rather naively writes, "I had thought that once a winner was formally declared, the post-election rancor would die down, that everyone would move on. But in the years to come, we found that, for some, the bitterness remained."

And while George may have been born with the thick skin politics demands, Laura is less ready for criticisms. She hires someone to do her hair every day to avoid jabs in the press, and makes note — a rather long note — of how the first family has to pay for its own household expenses, from food to dry cleaning (which, she points out, "is only fair.")

"I was amazed at the sheer number of designer clothes that I was expected to buy, like the women before me, to meet fashion expectations for a first lady." Out of office now, she dries her own hair.

Then comes Sept. 11, 2001. White House life was transformed into a series of reactions to possible threats. Meanwhile, she continues as official hostess and ambassador.

As the presidency winds up, she returns to more interesting little anecdotes. How, when visiting Afghanistan, the Secret Service wouldn't let her share a glass of pomegranate juice with President Karzai in Afghanistan, for fear it would be poisoned. How the tight security at the White House wound up in several unplanned apprehensions of people for parking tickets, outstanding arrest warrants or illegal status. And how Prince Charles and Camilla spiked their water glasses with gin before facing a White House receiving line.

She didn't like receiving lines much herself, and advises anyone going through one to keep their remarks brief. She certainly wasn't unhappy to head back to Texas in January 2009.

But, one gets the sense that, whether or not the quiet librarian would have liked better a less public life with a less controversial husband, George W. Bush could not have found a better wife.

mmiller@buffnews.com