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A FRIEND OF MR. LINCOLN

Name: A FRIEND OF MR. LINCOLN
Author: Stephen Harrigan
ISBN: 978-0-307-70067-4

by Stephen Harrigan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016

A narrative that presents keen insights into Lincoln’s complex personality.

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A novel that concentrates on Lincoln’s early years in Illinois, from his friendship with the (fictional) poet Cage Weatherby to his (altogether too real) relationship with Mary Todd.

Harrigan presents Lincoln warts and all. In his version, Lincoln tells ribald jokes, writes morbid poetry, and even threatens suicide when he gets engaged to Mary Todd and at some level realizes the engagement is a terrible mistake. The novel opens with the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination and then flashes back to when he was 22 and meeting Cage for the first time as they buried casualties of the Black Hawk War. Cage is presented as a skilled amateur poet whose work Lincoln much admires and a successful businessman—at least till the end of the novel, when his investments collapse. Cage becomes Lincoln’s confidant as Lincoln moves from being an itinerant lawyer to a member of the state legislature. Along the way we get to know some of Lincoln’s idiosyncrasies—his social ineptness, for example, especially around his fiancee—though these are balanced by a strong sense of honor and awareness of right and wrong. In one of his best moments he defends Cordelia, a runaway slave employed as a seamstress in a shop owned by Cage’s mistress, who's been thrown in jail until her owner can come north to claim her. Through legal knowledge and a sense of the dramatic, he succeeds in securing her freedom. In another episode, both ludicrous and grim, Lincoln is challenged to a duel by a man who feels he’s been slandered—and as the one challenged, Lincoln is allowed to choose the weapons. He chooses…broadswords. "You mean to fight this duel like a medieval knight?" a friend asks. "I mean to fight this duel with a weapon I can kill Jim Shields with if I need to," Lincoln replies.

A narrative that presents keen insights into Lincoln’s complex personality.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-307-70067-4

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LEOPARD IS LOOSE
by Stephen Harrigan

- BOOK REVIEW
BIG WONDERFUL THING
by Stephen Harrigan

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EYE OF THE MAMMOTH
by Stephen Harrigan

- PROFILES
Stephen Harrigan

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.