She was witty, tempestuous, a Kentucky blueblood; he was brilliant, moody, a farmer's son born in a log-cabin. They got married on a few hours notice in 1842, when he was thirty-three and she was nearly twenty-four. Spanning their mysterious and troubled courtship in 1840 through his assassination in Ford's Theatre in 1865, Daniel Mark Epstein has produced an incisive and balanced portrait of the Lincolns. The only book-length treatment of the marriage was published in 1953, when scholars lacked today's resources, and were still struggling with deep-seated prejudices about Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln. For the first time, in The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage we can feel the full force of the tragedy that was the slow crumbling of their marriage, knowing it intimately from the first act to the last.
Intent on eroding the stereotype that Mary was mad and Abraham was saintly, Epstein utilizes some new sources to create a portrait of the Lincolns' marriage. In coolly objective tones, Adam Grupper narrates Epstein's detailed account of the couple's early years. Their turbulent courtship included a broken engagement that might be attributed to Lincoln's infection with syphilis. Epstein paints a picture of a couple deeply connected, both in romance and politics, from Springfield to the White House. Grupper's nasal timbre is well suited to this work, which is narrative heavy. He reads most of the dialogue plainly, but his few forays into accents are distracting. Although Grupper trods a bit heavily on Epstein's occasional poetic passages, overall, his informative reading fits the text well. N.M.C. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Daniel Mark Epstein is the author of biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, Aimee Semple McPherson, Nat King Cole, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among other publications. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Epstein the Rome Prize in 1977 and an Academy Award in 2006.
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