After reading Laura Bush's memoir of her life before and after the White House, you realize that is the only way she would tell it - from the heart.

Laura Welch grew up in Midland, Texas, a beloved child who longed for brothers and sisters.

Midland, a "boom and bust" oil town is a "a place where the soil fractures, cracks and blows up against you with the wind."

Laura's early years were happy ones; she loved reading. Books and solitary pastimes took the place of the companionship of siblings. She made friendships that have endured over the years.

But at age 17, as an inexperienced driver chatting with a girlfriend, she drove through a stop sign causing an accident in which a young male friend was killed.

The Douglas family lost their son, Mike, and Laura had decades of "unspoken grief".

She graduated from Southern Methodist University and became an inner-city teacher, went back to school to become a librarian, went back to Midland, where she met her man and at age 31 "the old maid of Midland married Midland's most eligible bachelor,"George W. Bush.

The Bush family was a well-known political entity and George W. followed in that tradition.

The births of their daughter, Jenna and Barbara, named after their grandmothers, were among Laura's happiest moments.

But as her husband won the Texas governor's race, her father was dying in Midland.

It is as if her life is one of great joy and, alternately, great heartbreak.

There's the unimaginable thrill of moving into the White House after her husband won one of the closest presidential elections ever in U.S. history, which was too soon followed by the unimaginable attack of 9-11; the adulation George W. received in his strong leadership of the aftermath of the attack, then the criticism following our entry into Iraq, later Katrina and "the surge" all to be followed by the happiness she experienced as their daughter, Jenna was married to Henry Hager at their Crawford, Texas, ranch.

Laura Bush, the very private person was in the media spotlight and she shone.

As First Lady, Laura traveled extensively. Her initial visit to Afghanistan was to attend the U.S.- Afghan Women's Council meeting. An agenda included advocacy for women in the Middle East. She later consoled the Aids-stricken in her visits to Africa and supported programs at home to end urban violence. With gratitude, she visited our troops and their families.

With her love of books, Laura's main thrust was literacy; she established The National Book Festival.

Interesting little tidbits interjected into the memoir: about her mother-in-law, tart-tongued Barbara Bush, Bar, as she was known by family and friends, and who "managed to insult nearly all of my friends with one or another perfectly timed acerbic comment;" about Prince Charles and Camilla, who had to have a nip of gin from his flask to fortify themselves for a long receiving line; about notables; the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict.

SPOKEN FROM THE HEART is a history lesson, the eight years of the Bush presidency and a love story; the close loving relationship she had with her parents, her daughters and her husband, whom she described as "being anchored" and to their being "two symbiotic souls."

We, the readers, never get to really know George, her husband, as intimately as we do her mother and father.

Laura Bush was an exemplary First Lady, an intelligent, kind, compassionate woman "who gracefully rose to the occasion and is now very deservedly again enjoying private life.