5 comments about Florence Harding: The First Lady, The Jazz Age, And The Death Of America's Most Scandalous President.

1. I found this book hard to put down. I had not realized all the things this obscure first lady was involved with in her life. She looks like somebody's stern grandmother so when I idly looked through this book, I was surprised to find myself drawn in immediately. It is a large book, but I read it very fast as I just could not put it down. This is how a biography should be written, it is well researched and yet still reads almost like a novel.



2. How to make a fairly dull and unpleasant like Florence Harding come alive is a difficult enough feat, however the author does a splendid job of doing it! Expertly researched and pleasantly told, Mrs. Harding comes off far better than she has ever been depicted before - and perhaps even better than she deserves.



3. Writer Carl Anthony has composed an outstanding biography in his work Florence Harding. Harding Florence Harding been one of the more easily understood or admired First Lady's in this nations history, this book would have been written years ago. However, Mrs. Harding's legacy has been in the past told and retold more as a tabloid story than factual account.
   
   When approaching this book, one needs to understand how Mrs. Harding's legacy was tainted by three men, none of which was her husband Warren G. Harding. First, Gaston Means - a grifter and one time low level FBI agent - did a master job at maligning the deceased Mrs. Harding in his book, The Strange Death of President Harding, a ghost written work that was penned by a tabloid jouranlist who sued Means when he failed to honor his obligations to the writer. In this book, Means paints the picture of Mrs. harding that is pervasive in American Pop Culture: that Mrs. Harding was clueless love lorn hag, who spent her time with mystics plotting the Presidents next moves in star charts. This is an image that the public bought, hook, line and sinker.
   
   The other two men who betrayed Mrs. Harding were her doctor, Charles E. Sawyer and his son Dr. Carl Sawyer. The Sawyers held Mrs. Harding in their sway - she believed that they were great medical doctors, however it was the elder Sawyer's mis diagnosis of President Harding's heart condition as food poisoning. When Charles Sawyer discovered that the widowed First Lady's kidney ailment acted up, he travelled to Washington DC and demanded that Florence return to Marion Ohio for treatment at his private Sanatorium rather than seek treatment at at the better suited facilities in Washington. Mrs, Harding was placed in a cottage at the facility, and then kept at the facility by Sawyer's son Carl after the elder Sawyer died. Following Mrs. Harding's death, Dr. Carl Sawyer assummed total control of the Harding Memorial Association and maintained an iron grip on the Harding legacy until his death in the 1960s. As with all great dictators, Carl Sawyer controlled all aspects of the Harding legacy. As a result, the public never had a fair opportunity to study the Harding's, but rather were fed a steady stream of "approved" information about the couple.
   
   Anthony's work goes the distance in seperating the negative myths from the honest truths in her life, which by any standard was not charmed. However, the author does take liberties in communicating his emotions about Mrs. Harding. He believes that she has been mis-portrayed and his passion about correcting that sometimes overstates her case. However, his book is very well documented by copious endnotes and reliable first person accounts and primary documents.
   
   This book will never be a New York Times best seller - the public would rather believe that Harding Myths inseatd of the facts - but for those who care to learn more about the truths of the 29th President and his most remarkable wife, this is a satisfying and accurate book to read.



4. The Harding administration is buried in 20th century obscurity. Aside from the words "Teapot Dome", which few laymen know anything about, and the overriding scandal that dogged Harding's reputation after he left office, there are few people who would even know the name of the first lady.
   
   Florence Harding portrays the image of a plain, dowdy hayseed, but the author brings her to life in the context of an amazing time in our history.
   
   The 1920's were a time of a burgeoning economy, a rich underground economy with speakeasies, amazing jazz, racial awareness, and a recovery from World I. Florence Harding worked behind the scenes to prop her husband up to the challenge of the presidency. Recent revisionist historians have re-examined his presidency to look at his leadership, and his vision beyond the republican side of the aisle.
   
   Florence Harding welcomed in the Jazz Age, consulted "spiritual advisors", and looked at feminist causes long before many of her contemporaries. She also loved and adored her husband, looking past his infidelities, and his out-of-wedlock children.
   
   Warren Harding was in over his head as President. He was an innocent idealist who was thrust into a dark horse candidacy by unscrupulous men who he believed were his friends. He was also a popular and beloved President at he time of his death.
   
   This book, however, is about his wife. She was a tirelessly driven woman, cannily intelligent, with a strength that propelled her to the pinnacle of American leadership.
   
   It is a story few would undertake to tell, and it is riveting. While Florence Harding never comes off as likable, she is portrayed as loyal, admirable, and visionary beyond her time. There is a touching passage, as she sits next to Warren's open coffin, when she tells her husband "nobody can hurt you now, W'urrn".
   
   She clearly understood the power of the office, and the damage it had done to her husband.
   
   An engrossing biography, on an unlikely subject.



5. The Washington Times wrote a terrific review of this book, which follows:
   
   A President Of the Peephole
   By Carl Sferrazza Anthony
   Special to The Washington Post
   Sunday, June 7, 1998
   
   Fearing revelations about his illicit affair with a young campaign volunteer - which included sex in an Oval Office hideaway while under the guard of Secret Service agents - the president realized that stonewalling was ultimately futile. He stunned a private party of reporters at the National Press Club by confessing his carnal desires.
   
   "It's a good thing I am not a woman," the president said. "I would always be pregnant. I can't say no."
   
   In this administration, the scandals never seemed to end. There was the strange suicide of an administration official, made even more mysterious by a note that disappeared. Then came an investigation into payoffs and coverups connected to a notorious land deal. The president's friends launched smear campaigns against his perceived foes. Dossiers were compiled; private eyes and snitches deployed. Affidavits were drafted in which various women denied liaisons with the president. Jobs were arranged to keep people quiet.
   
   Through it all, a steel-willed first lady kept the press at bay and did whatever was necessary to defend her husband's reputation - even if it meant destroying evidence.
   
   The scandals erupted at a time when technological advances in communication were feeding a nation hungry for distraction, and the economy was booming. Sex sold - and the ravenous press corps was all too happy to name names and offer seamy details. The president and his wife boosted their public image by bringing Hollywood stars to the White House; they knew the value of glamour and the power of celebrity. It also helped that he was a genial populist and inveterate shaker of hands, fond of golf and cards, a man of the people.
   
   Ladies thought him virile and handsome; he photographed well.
   For some reason, all of this seems familiar. Whatever else may be said of Warren Gamaliel Harding - whose tenure as 29th president ended with his peculiar, premature death in 1923 - he was a truly modern politician. His administration, which reeked of corruption, offers a prototype for Washington scandals. Whitewater, Iran-contra and Watergate are better known today, but the granddaddy of them all was Teapot Dome, a political maelstrom that broke 75 years ago this month and is still hard to top in terms of sheer outrageousness.
   
   Harding, a small-town Ohio newspaper publisher, was uniquely unsuited for the job of president - and he knew it. "I am not fit for this office and never should have been here," he once said. But he "looked like a president," as one major backer put it, and his wife, Florence, was instrumental in shepherding his political career. (The press considered Florence, known as the Duchess, to be the power behind the throne; one cartoon depicted the couple as "The Chief Executive and Mr. Harding.") Harding, a one-term Republican senator, won the job by promising Americans a "return to normalcy" after World War I.
   
   Though his legacy was soiled, his domestic achievements were substantial: the 40-hour work week, improved health care for new mothers, the first balanced-budget bureau, a focus on technology. And we have to give Harding credit for establishing a venerable institution: the Washington gossip mill. Based on new documentation, here's a reprise of the Harding era.
   
   I love your back, I love your breasts
   Darling to feel, where my face rests,
   I love your skin, so soft and white,
   So dear to feel and sweet to bite. . . .
   I love your poise of perfect thighs,
   When they hold me in paradise. . . .
   -- A Harding poem to one of his mistresses, Carrie Phillips
   
   No president had more "women scrapes," as his attorney general put it, than Warren G. His first affair, three years into his marriage to Florence, was with Susie Hodder - his wife's best friend from childhood - resulting in the birth of a daughter. His second affair was with Florence's closest adult friend, Carrie Fulton Phillips. It lasted 15 years. His third enduring mistress was his Senate aide, Grace Cross.
   Number four was the most infamous and the first presidential mistress to write a memoir: In the large Oval Office closet, the president had at least one tryst with Nan Britton, a campaign volunteer who had started having sex with Harding when he was 51 and she was 22. Their assignations, facilitated by Secret Service agents James Sloan and Walter Ferguson ("Harding hated to have them around, for he despised being watched," reported the chief usher), came to an abrupt stop when another agent, Harry Barker, tipped Florence off, and she ran down for a confrontation.
   
   It was in Harding's Senate office, late one night in the winter of 1919, that Britton claimed she conceived their daughter, Elizabeth Ann. They disrobed because Harding wanted to "visualize" her while he worked there during the day. Britton worried that they lacked the "usual paraphernalia which we always took to the hotels . . . and of course, the Senate Offices do not provide preventive facilities for use in such emergencies."
   
   He had assorted other flings, including one with Rosa Hoyle, said to have conceived his only illegitimate son, and one with Augusta Cole, whose pregnancy by Harding was terminated. He bedded a Washington Post employee known as Miss Allicott, and former chorus girls Maize Haywood and Blossom Jones - all procured by Harding's crony, Washington Post publisher and owner Ned McLean. And then there's the string of "New York women" - including one who committed suicide after Harding wouldn't marry her, and another who had a stash of incriminating love letters purchased by Harding loyalists.
   
   The president even publicly ogled Margaret Gorman, the first Miss America, in Atlantic City, days after her crowning.
   
   Follow the Money
   
   Just weeks after his inauguration in 1921, Harding approved Interior Secretary Albert Fall's request to transfer oil reserves from the Navy Department to Fall's control. Fall then secretly leased the reserve at Elks Hills, Calif., to oilman Edward Doheny and the one at Teapot Dome, Wyo., to Harry Sinclair - in exchange for a "loan" of cash and stock worth nearly $400,000, delivered in a small black satchel, and a "gift" of $100,000 from Doheny. Fall became the first Cabinet member to be thrown in prison.
   
   Col. Charles Forbes, the first director of the U.S. Veterans Bureau, created by Harding, was particularly close to the first lady. She saw to his appointment, and entrusted him with $450 million to build hospitals and provide decent medical care for the thousands of disabled veterans of World War I, on whose behalf the Duchess was a national activist.
   
   Instead, he bilked tens of thousands out of building contractors and medical supply companies. He was eventually imprisoned - but not before Harding personally throttled him against the Red Room wall in the White House.
   
   Although Attorney General Harry Daugherty, a Harding crony and campaign manager, eluded conviction on a variety of pardon-selling and influence-peddling charges, his Justice Department was riddled with malfeasance, kickbacks and payoffs. One of the department's central tasks was to intimidate any Harding mistress who threatened the president with blackmail.
   
   High Officials
   
   Evalyn McLean, the Post publisher's wife, was a confidante of Mrs. Harding and an admitted intermittent morphine addict. Despite Prohibition, she also was a heavy drinker and speakeasy regular - but then, so were her husband and other ranking government officials: Albert Fall, Col. Forbes and the president's chief aide, George Christian. In the Veterans Bureau, stories eventually broke about flapper secretaries and young officers having a regular cocktail hour, with shakers and glasses at the ready, overseen by Forbes.
   
   The president served liquor freely in the present-day Yellow Oval Room to his guests. Alice Longworth - a regular at poker - recalled that the first lady mixed the drinks. "No rumor could have exceeded the truth. . . . [T]rays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about," she remembered. And, according to recently declassified FBI reports, Harding was drunk on whiskey during an Oval Office confrontation with railroad union leaders during their 1922 strike.
   
   At the center of the capital's most elite bootlegging service was Jess Smith - who, even though never an employee or even a volunteer at the Justice Department, used official letterhead, cars and staff, and sat in on private meetings with FBI Director Billy Burns. Smith enjoyed these perks as the bachelor companion of the attorney general. Smith also served as the first lady's favorite escort and arbiter of her jaunty '20s fashions.
   
   Through the Justice Department, Smith had access to whiskey supplies confiscated by Prohibition agents, and some of the booze went directly to the White House, and to the McLeans, while the rest was kept for parties at the "Love Nest," the small house shared by Smith and Daugherty, complete with a pink taffeta bedroom.
   
   Hollywood Values
   
   Working closely with Republican National Committee Chairman Will Hays during the 1920 campaign, Florence Harding conceived of recruiting Hollywood movie stars to support her husband. Al Jolson was drafted to head the Harding-Coolidge Theatrical League, and on Aug. 24, 1920, the marriage of politics and entertainment was forged forever when Jolson brought 40 movie stars to the Harding home for a campaign rally.
   
   The White House became a little Hollywood. On any given day, D.W. Griffith, the Gish sisters or Tom Mix might pose for newsreel cameras with the Hardings. When Hays left his job as postmaster general to become president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, he developed a "project to link the White House with the motion picture industry" by providing a movie library. All of this was nothing short of immoral to old society. The religious press took even greater offense to Florence's ringing the stately halls with jazz for the first time. The Biblical Recorder excoriated the Hardings for "setting a bad example by joining in the modern dance with its 'jazz' music."
   
   Squelching the Bimbos
   
   There was a good reason for Jess Smith having a vaguely defined association with the Justice Department. In this way, he was able to act at the implicit direction of the attorney general and FBI director and carry out a systematic intimidation of Harding mistresses who threatened to do as Carrie Phillips did and demand blackmail for their love letters. At one point, in exchange for apparently small amounts of money, affidavits disclaiming rumors of their liaisons were wrestled out of Evelyn Ruby, Augusta Cole and Cecilia Hoyle, and made their way to the first lady.
   
   In April 1921, Ned McLean officially became an agent of the FBI, and did his utterly unethical best to destroy any anti-Harding efforts he heard about as publisher of The Post. Such responsibilities included ripping the blouse of Nan Britton to try to snatch letters she claimed to be carrying - in the privacy of his editorial office.
   
   Even on the eve of his inauguration, Harding was providing more trouble for his troubleshooters. He had arranged a late-night rendezvous with Grace Cross, his Senate aide, in a Willard Hotel room. Some of his friends, recalled Olive Clapper, a reporter's wife, "ordered her to pack and get out of town, threatening to put the FBI on her trail if she didn't go at once. She was so frightened she left immediately."
   
   Psychic Guidance
   
   Mrs. Harding's diary, discovered last year at an Ohio barn auction, revealed her to be a true believer in crystal ball readings, the zodiac and clairvoyance. In February 1920, as a Senate wife, she had her first consultation with capital society's seer, "Madame Marcia." The psychic predicted that if Harding ran for president that year, he would be nominated - but that if he won the election, he would not live through his full term and instead die of "sudden, peculiar, violent . . . death by poison."
   
   Knowing that the blackmail price of $25,000 demanded by Carrie Phillips for the love letters could never be met unless her husband became a presidential nominee, Florence pushed him through the primaries on to the nomination, ignoring the ominous prediction. During the Harding presidency, Madame Marcia was regularly fetched by the first lady's Secret Service agent, brought through the back entrance and escorted to the presidential bedroom for zodiac updates. Madame Marcia also did horoscopes for the president's public appearances; the first lady was trying to protect him from numerous assassination and bomb threats.
   
   When Florence got early inklings of the Teapot Dome, Veteran's Bureau and Justice Department scandals, she asked Marcia to do astrological charts of Cabinet members - and used the results as evidence to remove some of the crooks from the administration.
   
   Blackmailers' Delight
   
   Newly discovered documents now prove that Harding was the only president successfully blackmailed by a mistress. Once he was nominated as the Republican candidate, the national GOP committee paid off Carrie Phillips's lump-sum demand of $25,000 and monthly stipend of $2,000, funneled through a secret bank account kept, apparently, under Jess Smith's name (the records were burned by Attorney General Daugherty).
   Once Harding became president, Phillips returned from an all-expense-paid trip abroad and demanded that her brother and son-in-law be given federal posts. It was done. Harding even circulated the name of Phillips's husband to be ambassador to Japan - before word got out why he thought a dry-goods salesman from Marion, Ohio, deserved the post and the idea was quashed.
   
   One night, when he was a senator, Harding had such a row with aide Grace Cross that she cut his back and the police were called. Thereafter, Cross went around town talking about a "birthmark" on the president's back that she could identify - undoubtedly the wound - which became part of her arsenal in unsuccessful attempts to get blackmail money. However, former Democratic attorney general Mitchell Palmer would later use his knowledge of the Cross affair to force Harding to drop a Justice Department prosecution against him.
   
   Crossing a Friend
   
   After a failed attempt to frame Cross with a phony affidavit claiming she was a liar and blackmailer, Smith approached Bertha Martin - a friend of Cross's - to try to get possession of the aide's love letters from Harding. Martin said she would turn on her friend on the condition that she was given the job of society editor at The Post. Smith went to McLean, who gave his nod. Martin took Cross to lunch, asked to see the letters, snatched them away and bolted out of the restaurant. She was made society editor - and still managed to stay friends with Cross, taking her on a European vacation, courtesy of the secret blackmail fund.
   
   Deadly Sins
   
   During a party at Smith and Daugherty's "Love Nest," some New York chorus girls were brought down to entertain a stag party. In attendance was the president. When glasses and bottles were being flung off the table so the dancing girls could perform, one Washington prostitute, identified only as a Miss Walsh, was knocked unconscious. Harding was hustled out. The woman died and was buried in a potter's field.
   
   In recently discovered transcripts of her taped revelations, Evalyn McLean recalled that the FBI director "railroaded" the woman's brother into St. Elizabeths mental hospital when he suggested a blackmail payment.
   
   Censorship by Book Burning
   
   "The Strange Death of President Harding," written in 1930 by the notorious perjurer and former FBI agent Gaston Means, implied that Florence Harding poisoned her husband in retaliation for his adultery, but the book has long been dismissed as a fabrication. New evidence shows that while Means lied in details, he told general truths. He said that he was part of an FBI effort to seize and destroy a small, privately printed book, "The Illustrated Life of Warren Gamaliel Harding," that revealed Harding's affair with Carrie Phillips, the RNC blackmail payoff and Florence's out-of-wedlock child by a common-law first husband.
   
   This turned out to be the only book suppressed by the government in peacetime. The entire action was illegal, and thus the boxes of books and updated manuscript inserts were taken not to any government property but to the McLean estate, where they were all burned. Well, not all: An original with the author's notes sits with none other than Evalyn
   
   
   Spying
   
   Among Gaston Means's other sensational charges was that he spied for the first lady on Nan Britton. In fact, it was probably Grace Cross - for at least one letter sent to her from the president's office was purloined and found its way into the file on Cross in the McLeans' private papers. Post reporter Vylla Poe Wilson later admitted that both "Mrs. Harding and Mrs. McLean were very jealous women, and they hired Gaston Means to follow Harding and McLean and report on their actions." In congressional hearings on the Justice Department, it was confirmed that Agent Means not only spied on Cross but the president's physician, Charles Sawyer, and his mistress, the first lady's housekeeper.
   
   Suicides
   
   Congress first heard tales of gross corruption at the Veterans Bureau in February 1923. Col. Forbes's colleague in kickbacks, Charles Cramer - the bureau's chief counsel, and the purchaser of the Hardings' Senate home - wrote out a letter to the president in his dining room, then stood before the bathroom mirror and shot himself. The letter mysteriously disappeared.
   
   At the start of the summer, the first big Harding scandal broke with the news that Jess Smith was found in his room with his head in a trash can, and a bullet in his head. The official word went out that it was a suicide due to health and emotional problems. Bertha Martin of The Post recalled that it was "noised about" town that Smith was a known homosexual, and that he was heartbroken over Daugherty's sudden rejection of his friendship when the president learned of Smith's nefarious activities. Others, like Evalyn McLean, simply believed Daugherty, Means or Burns had Smith killed because he knew too much. As for Martin, after a second career bootlegging whiskey to embassies, she was found dressed in her fur coat, pearls and white gloves with her head on the gas range, another alleged suicide.
   
   Negligent Homicide?
   
   Beginning on June 20, 1923, the Hardings sought to escape the heat and scandal of Washington on a 15,000-mile transcontinental train trip and voyage to Alaska. The president was 57 at the time. The recently unsealed diary and notes of naval physician Joel Boone reveal Boone's grave concerns about the president's heart condition. The warnings were ignored by longtime Harding homeopath "Doc" Sawyer, who made no effort to stop Harding from speaking in the blistering heat, driving the golden spike to complete the Alaska Railroad, or doing other arduous tasks. In this Sawyer had the absolute approval of the first lady, who was now enjoying the height of her national popularity and didn't want the trip canceled. She viewed the incompetent Sawyer as her own Rasputin, who'd miraculously kept a chronic kidney ailment from killing her.
   
   When Harding suffered a bout of food poisoning from tainted crab meat at Cordova, Alaska, Doc Sawyer ultimately weakened the president's sick heart by treating him with heavy doses of purgatives to flush out the toxins. On Aug. 2, 1923, when Boone was out of the sickroom in San Francisco's Palace Hotel, Sawyer plied one too many purgatives - in Florence's presence - and Harding died. There was a quick coverup regarding who was in the room and at precisely what time the president died. Mrs. Harding refused to permit an autopsy or a death mask, protecting her beloved Sawyer. "Now that is all over," she told Evalyn McLean after Harding's death, "I think it was all for the best."
   
   Evidence Destruction
   
   At the McLean estate, aptly named Friendship, Evalyn permitted the widowed first lady to bring from the White House wood crates full of government documents (which may have been incriminating to Harding) and helped burn them. Even though Mrs. Harding was being spied on and her phone was tapped during the congressional investigations of the scandals, she was able to keep destroying documents within the privacy of her Willard Hotel suite.
   
   Four months after leaving Washington, Florence died at age 64 in Marion, Ohio. She was staying in a cottage on the grounds of the Sawyer Sanitarium "for the treatment of nervous and mental diseases," amid signs that read: "Please do not stare at the Patients."
   
   This article is adapted from Carl Sferrazza Anthony's just-published biography, "Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age and the Death of America's Most Scandalous President" (Morrow).

No comments about Public papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1959; containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the President, January 1 to December 31, 1959.

No comments about Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ.

No comments about James Madison - The Sage of Montpelier (Biography).

No comments about The Triumph of Internationalism: Franklin D. Roosevelt and a World in Crisis, 1933-1941 (Issues in the History of American Foreign Relations).

5 comments about Road Song.

1. As a fellow writer oh how I hated Natalie Kusz as I read her book. She is that rare combination of a brilliant writer and someone with something to say. I could barely contain my envy, and admiration, as I read. This is a book that disappoints only because it ends.



2. Originally it was the title that popped out on this one: aha! another great travel novel, I hoped. Oh no, much better and much more intense!!! A woman reconstructs for us the story of her unusual "hippy" parents, her father a refugee from Poland's wartime harshness. The parents have four children and cannot stand the modern life of the Southern California suburbs. Off they go, packed up in an old truck, all the way to Alaska. With a relative's gift/loan, they buy land and begin to build a house on the outskirts of Fairbanks. Needless to say, money is very tight, jobs are scarce, and the winter is setting in. The parents scrounge through the Salvation Army and the local U.S. Army dump for supplies, even finding food to keep them going. They are true pioneers in the face of horrible winter weather: -50F in a perpetual icefog, through which the kids sometimes trek to get to the the schoolbus stop.
   
   Natalie's account of her horrific accident, when underfed huskies break their chains and rip her face off, ruining one eye, is one of these memoirs almost impossible to believe is true. But yes, it is true, and luckily the parents have insurance, and are able, in the late 1960's, to save their daughter, fight infection from reaching her brain, and have her face reconstructed over years of medical appointments.
   
   In addition to this horrible disaster, the parents are barely making it financially, and for years, simply live together packed in a trailer out in the wilderness, far from town. The kids get older, need to go to school, and find that the local town is full of rough-tough kids, mainly from the U.S.Army base, who early fall into drugs, drinking and promiscuity. So of course, our Natalie does so as well, but doesn't tell her parents, until the news she can't avoid: she's pregnant at 16.
   
   On and on this story goes, and makes the reader want to keep on going for more. It's true that it's not exceptionally well-written - certainly it seems a bit too casual in its style. The author, only 27, does come across as self-involved, but perhaps that's understandable. Her mother's early death and father's early onset of heart disease make this tragedy almost unbearable. One wonders how she really could have done it all, including with the little girl, raising her alone.
   
   Definitely a great read, not at all typical "American" in any yearning for a better life. She concludes that she is attached to Alaska and decides at the time of writing (1990) that she will go back and stay up there, near her father's house.



3. I read this book years ago, and found it very moving. I think Ms. Kusz is a good writer and extremely courageous. Her childhood (quite honestly) sounds horrible, but her parents are very loving and kind and smart.
   
   One thing that did disturb me about the book was that Ms. Kusz seemed to need to convince us that her parents were right in leaving LA for Alaska. For example, she writes that she and her siblings (aged 1 to 7) were sick of modern life and its accroutrements. This is hard to believe! Little kids don't know enough about the world yet to be sick of it.
   
   In LA, her parents had a house, jobs, a large backyard, family close by, warm weather, etc. In Alaska, they had nothing. They didn't even have enough money to buy the land they wanted so much. How could her parents uproot four young kids for such an uncertain future! Can you imagine her mom's life--even before Natalie's terrible accident. Four little kids, no money, not enough food, husband away working, living in a trailer with no bathroom, the weather sometimes 50 or 60 below.
   
   All the things her parents wanted--outdoor life, contact with wildlife, streams, orchards, etc., -- none of that happens in Alaska. There's no mention of the family having fun doing "country" things. It seems their adventure was not successful. Perhaps if Natalie hadn't gotten hurt things might have been different, but it doesn't seem that likely. They still were poverty-stricken, without a home or a job, living in a place where it got 70 below. I once saw a review that said the Kusz decision to move was almost comprable to child abuse, and I am tempted to agree.
   
   With that said, I really admire Natalie's ability to rise above a terribly painful childhood, filled with extraordinary physical pain. I hope she is well and I wish she'd write another book.



4. I was very excited when I found this memoir at a gently used bookstore. I thought it was very good. I felt like I was traveling to Alaska right along with Natalie. This is one of those books that you hope will have a sequel someday.



5. In a culture that demonizes the poor and marginalizes the children of the poor, the Kusz family faces more than just 70 below temperatures, the author's tragic accident, hunger and squalor. Those who live more mainstream (read that affluent and conforming) lives, imagine those who live in rural (or urban) poverty as morally, intellectually and spiritually as well as financially impoverished. What Natalie Kusz does in this unforgettable memoir is to slow the reader down and draw her up close to those who travel that other road-- to allow the reader to view scenes of violence, abuse, charity and grace. The book is beautifully written. The only thing I would argue with is locating the father's backstory so close to the end of the book in one large chunk, instead of interspersing part of it throughout the book where it might shed some light on his own particular demons. Interestingly, I read each of the other reviews of this book and found in every one some bit of wisdom and thoughtfulness. This book is well worth reading twice--first for the story and then for a fruitful discussion of memoir.

2 comments about Pierre Elliot Trudeau: The Fascinating Life of Canada's Most Flamboyant Prime Minister (Amazing Stories) (Amazing Stories).

1. Pierre Trudeau,the reknowned Canadian Leader, rules in this great book.It's a must see!!



2. I really loved this book and found it to be candid, well-researched and informative. I had just finished watching a video called, "Trudeau: The Man, The Myth, the Movie," which I liked until I realized how many errors it contained. That video declared that James Cross died in the FLQ crisis! A quick Google search for Cross shows that the man is still alive. Fortunately, Sauerwein got his facts straight.

   Although I was born in Canada, I grew up in New Jersey and spent 30 years there. I have since moved back to Ontario, so I'm a bit of a hybrid in that I'm part Canadian and part American. But I'm enough of an American that I didn't follow all of the FLQ details that closely at the time, so I found both the book and the video to be quite suspenseful because I couldn't remember how the story ended!

   Trudeau was brilliant, charismatic, controversial and stubborn. He was courageous and had his own unique and epic vision for Canada. He also came to power during a period when the country faced one crisis after another in terms of Québec, OPEC, and economics. Trudeau had some very tough decisions to make -- I would never have wanted to trade places with him in the FLQ hostage situation. Makes me think of Jimmy Carter's unpopularity that resulted directly from his passive approach to the Iranian hostage taking. Carter adopted that style because he wanted to save the hostages but it cost him the election, and as a result the United States swerved to the right with Reagonomics.

   At any rate, I would highly recommend this very well-written book. There were many occasions where the author could have chosen to sensationalize certain details about Pierre or Margaret Trudeau but he tastefully refused to do that. Kudos!

   My only complaint would be that a number of times, the word focused was spelled as "focussed." A French editor, perhaps :-)

No comments about Edward IV (Routledge Historical Biographies).

No comments about The Presidencies of George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush: Like Father Like Son?.

No comments about A Star Turn.