Former President of the United States, George H. W. Bush has been out of the public limelight for the last few years due to health challenges and complications. The 41st president, however, has still managed to come through clearly in a sizzling new biography that hits the bookstores early next week.

One unusual thing about the elder Bush’s biography is that he takes a sharp and critical eye to two people that were influential to him as well as his son’s presidency. Bush, 91, is critical of both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in this new biography written by noted historian Jon Meacham, reports CBS News.

Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld go way back together. All the way back to serving Richard Nixon and being closely involved in American politics since that time. The new biography is entitled: Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. The former president is extremely critical of both Cheney and Rumsfeld with regard to how they served when his son, George W. Bush, was president especially with regard to the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath.

Bush maintains that Cheney as vice president under his son had acted in far too independent a way during and after the attacks. Bush considered Cheney to be too much the hawk and the hard liner. Bush seemed to come down ever harder on Rumsfeld intimating that he did not serve his son well at all. Cheney had served the elder Bush in his cabinet but the former president laments that Cheney greatly changed over the years. He had become so much the hard liner that Bush barely recognized him as his old friend anymore. He believes it was the Sept. 11 attacks that sent Cheney over the hard edge.

In the book, the elder Bush doesn’t seem to object to his son’s invasion of Iraq and believes that the world is a much safer place without Saddam Hussein.