By Steve Rhodes
Who knew – among us mere civilians – that Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe’s son, had such a strange life.
“He knew that he would never have been made Secretary of War or Ambassador to Great Britain without the Lincoln name, and his weird accidental presence at the assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, in 1881 and 1901, must have seemed a fateful punishment for refusing his father’s invitation to Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865,” Thomas Mallon writes in the New Yorker.
Paging conspiracy theorists and spiritualists! I mean, my God!
“Robert Lincoln is the unhappy central presence in Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon,” Mallon writes. “Among the nearly fifteen thousand books published on Lincoln since his death, this one, which will appear next month, is an oddly magnificent downer, lavish and pictorial, but more wince-inducing than anything else, covering a post-Reconstruction era that prompted Frederick Douglass to pronounce emancipation, in its actual practice, ‘a stupendous fraud’ against Southern blacks and Lincoln himself.”
Abraham Obama
“Abraham Lincoln does not a democracy make,” John R. MacArthur writes in You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers To Democracy In America.
“And even then,” Zay Smith of the Sun-Times writes, “remember that Abe was his time’s version of a corporate lawyer.
“MacArthur lays out the story from the days of the Founding Fathers to these days. It is a story of power out of money and money out of power, the two embraced and twirling on a ballroom floor, and woe betide you if you tap a shoulder and ask for the next dance.”
It is a story that MacArthur lays out to the present day.
“As for Obama?” Smith writes. “MacArthur starts the narrative: ‘To read Obama’s list of prominent bank, media, law-firm and corporate contributors – 11 of which were also in Clinton’s top 20 – was to see a man already deeply compromised . . . ‘
“The narrative takes us, also, through the story of a candidate who came up from real public service on the Chicago streets the only way a politician can really come up in Chicago, which is to knock on the door of the Daley Machine and never have, after that, the audacity to say nope. You have to dance the dance. You have to unthumb the nose. To lick the metaphorical platter clean, you have to play ball.”
Super Slackers
“Sure, Batman got all the attention this summer as The Dark Knight swooped in,” Mike Danahey of the Sun-Times News Group wrote this week.
“But there are less-somber, quirkier protectors of the universe ready to take center stage in the new book Who Can Save Us Now? Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories.
“The cast of alternative good guys includes the Meerkat, the creepy Silverfish, Manna Man, who manipulates the minds of televangelists, and west suburban Wayne native Sam Weller’s lovable slackers, who aren’t exactly sitting up nights worrying about truth, justice and the American way.”
“Weller’s story, titled “The Quick Stop 5,” features five slackers working at a gas station convenience store in Iowa. When there’s a biodiesel spill outside, they transform into their alter egos as they huff the fumes.
“‘In the process, they inexplicably gain the powers of whatever product from the convenience store they were holding when they inhaled. One becomes a human Slurpee machine. Another turns into beef jerky. Another morphs into a glop of chewing tobacco. It ain’t pretty,’ said, Weller, a comic book aficionado since childhood.”
Roger and Marty
From the University of Chicago Press blog:
“Roger Ebert wrote the first film review that Martin Scorsese ever received: in 1967 for I Call First. Both Ebert and Scorsese were just embarking on their careers. Scorsese by Ebert offers the first record of America’s most respected film critic’s engagement with the works of America’s greatest living director, including reviews, interviews, and reconsiderations. We have an excerpt.”
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Roderick Heath also offers up a Scorsese retrospective over at Ferdy on Films.
The Staggering Story of Illinois
FYI: The Illinois chapter of State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America is written by Dave Eggers.
Posted on October 20, 2008