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A MORE OBEDIENT WIFE

Name: A MORE OBEDIENT WIFE
Author: Natalie Wexler
ISBN: 978-0-6151-3516-8

A NOVEL OF THE EARLY SUPREME COURT

by Natalie Wexler ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Desperate housewives, Colonial-style.

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The ghost of a love affair, excavated from long-forgotten letters.

Two Jameses and two Hannahs make for heated emotions in this ambitious historical drama that attempts, with mixed success, to inject some illicit romance into the lives of long-dead American noblemen. Filling in the gaps in the historical record is usually an exercise for academics. But Wexler, a former Supreme Court law clerk, has devoted considerable effort to shedding light on a minor historical controversy with a well-researched, if long-winded, work of fiction. Her novel inspired an article Wexler composed for The American Scholar about the lives and wives of two early justices of the United States Supreme Court, James Iredell and James Wilson. The book extends the article’s intriguing premise that Iredell, a Revolutionary War essayist who was appointed to the bench by George Washington, strayed into a not-altogether-indiscreet relationship with Wilson’s wife. Here, Hannah Gray Wilson is a young, attractive and emotional socialite who beguiles the much older man with her coquettish charms. Wexler imagines, based on a thin thread of historical evidence in her letters, that the affair did not sit well with Iredell’s pathologically shy wife (also named Hannah). The story of Mr. Iredell and Mrs. Wilson’s clandestine relationship is revealed through the fictional diaries of both Hannahs, punctuated with the real letters sent between the husbands and their wives, as well as occasional observations by other historical figures, like a young John Quincy Adams. Wexler has absorbed the language, rhythm and nuances of the letters to such a degree that her narrative flows together with them seamlessly. For those captivated by historical drama, this novel experiment may well be tempting, and devotees of Supreme Court history will find much to absorb. There is some interesting interplay between the two judges–friends by all accounts–trying to keep the nation on a steady course as they struggle to keep their own houses in order. The hysterics of their tempestuous wives (â€œShe is here, in my own House–a Viper in the nest”), however, are overly melodramatic at times.

Desperate housewives, Colonial-style.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-0-6151-3516-8

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.