At odds with much scholarship, including recent work like David Donald’s “We Are Lincoln Men” (2003)—readers will want to...
Don’t tell Ralph Reed or Jerry Falwell, but the Log Cabin Republicans are on to something big.
The secret, according to the late Kinsey Institute sex researcher Tripp, was that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Or mostly so, as Tripp qualifies with careful provisos: by the Kinsey seven-point scale, in which 0 equals entirely heterosexual and 7 equals entirely homosexual, Lincoln rates a 5, “predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual.” That incidental tendency, of course, netted Lincoln a wife and four children, but Tripp argues that the Railsplitter had little use for or interest in women or children all the same, preferring the company of men, such as bodyguard D.V. Derickson, who shared Lincoln’s bed and nightshirt in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was out of town. The evidence? Well, there were those eyewitness accounts of Derickson wandering around in Lincoln’s clothes. More incidentally, Tripp notes, are curiosities, such as the fact that Lincoln almost never went to church, though, when Mary Todd Lincoln was away, he was very likely to attend sermons with Derickson on a Sunday morning. Similarly, Tripp continues, Lincoln showered affection on one Elmer Ellsworth, who was inconveniently “definitely and explicitly heterosexual,” and who died very early in the war, both eventualities bringing yet more sorrow to the already melancholic president. And then there was Lincoln’s long-time dalliance with fellow lawyer Joshua Speed. Not to mention Mary’s general bossiness, bound to drive a fellow away from the hearth and into the arms of boon companions. Tripp approaches the matter with apparent sympathy, but his evidence is surrounded by much speculation and much poorly developed argumentation—the latter likely because the author died before revising the manuscript. In the end, readers will wonder about the ultimate point: Unless it helps correct current injustices, does it matter where Lincoln hung his stovepipe at night?
At odds with much scholarship, including recent work like David Donald’s “We Are Lincoln Men” (2003)—readers will want to approach this with some reserve. But an intriguing thesis all the same.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6639-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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