Henry and Clara: Amazon.de: Thomas Mallon: Englische Bücher

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Produktinformation

Taschenbuch: 358 Seiten
Verlag: Picador USA; Auflage: Reprint (September 1995)
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN-10: 0312135084
ISBN-13: 978-0312135089
Gr��e und/oder Gewicht: 20,6 x 13,7 x 3 cm

Durchschnittliche Kundenbewertung: 3.3 von 5 Sternen Alle Rezensionen anzeigen (9 Kundenrezensionen)

Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 1.779.126 in Englische Bücher (Siehe Top 100 in Englische Bücher)

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Produktbeschreibungen

From Booklist

From the footnotes of American history, Mallon has pulled authentic figures and embroidered a compelling novel. Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancee, Miss Clara Harris, were guests of President and Mrs. Lincoln at Ford's Theatre that fateful night when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln; in fact, Booth severely injured Major Rathbone in the process of eliminating the president. Mallon extends his novel's reach back to include the childhoods of Henry and Clara, who were actually stepsiblings. Clara was the daughter of a U.S. senator and became not only acquainted with Mary Todd Lincoln but was often present at the First Lady's social occasions in the White House; Henry Rathbone, unsettled ever since he was a boy, grew up to become an officer in the Civil War. Their love had evolved into more than simply that of stepbrother and stepsister, and after they witnessed the traumatic incident at Ford's Theatre, they were married and had children; however, eventually the disturbed Henry killed Clara in Europe, where he was later committed to an asylum. Mallon has taken the facts about these two and elaborated brilliantly. Brad Hooper -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

From Kirkus Reviews

Mallon (Rockets and Rodeos, 1992) has created an enjoyable, if depressing, novel about Henry and Clara Rathbone, who were sitting in the theater box with Mary and Abraham Lincoln on the night of the president's assassination. The fatal and fateful event appears to have pushed at least one of them over the edge, but even if the two young friends of the Lincolns had not been witnesses to that moment in history, they would have been a strange couple. Henry's widowed mother married Clara's widowed father when he was 11 and she was 13, and the two were raised in the same household. Upon introducing them Henry's mother instructed Clara to think of him as a cousin, cheerfully hoping to ``defeat complexity with inaccuracy.'' This quasi-family relationship did not stop the two from falling in love, but due to their parents' protests and Henry's involvement in the Civil War, they were not married until 1867, when they were in their early 30s. After Lincoln's death, rumors fly about Henry's inefficacy at the crucial moment, and even in later years that night haunts him, as in a scene at a dinner party when all the guests turn in Henry's direction after someone comments on what happens to people during moments of panic. Eventually, however, it appears that Henry's talk of all the whispering around him hints at schizophrenia and other psychological problems. He becomes intensely jealous of his flirtatious wife, who does her best to get Henry an ambassador's post abroad, since he drags the family--including three children-- to Europe yearly in an apparent effort to gain anonymity. With a final, dreadful act, Henry makes a last attempt to keep together the family he believes is leaving him. No magic, but solid writing about two casualties of history. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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Die hilfreichsten Kundenrezensionen

A Bit Depressing But a Good Depiction of the Times 16. M�rz 2000

Von David Savage

Format:Taschenbuch

Reading this book is like watching the Titanic. Throughout the story, you feel a sense of dread and you hope, maybe, just maybe, the inevitable may change.

This book is a quick read and gives you a good flavor of civil life during the Civil War. After reading a number of Civil War "battle" books, this story was a refreshing observation of the events. I use the word "refreshing" only to describe the perspective. The characters themselves are a bit depressing. The story does take a while to pick up. However, Thomas Mallon does a good job describing the Washington in the 1860s.

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Dull and Interesting by Turns 24. M�rz 1999

Von Ein Kunde

Format:Taschenbuch

I found this book to be very uneven in quality. I am an avid reader of material related to the Lincoln assassination, and I approached this book expecting it to be interesting if for no other reason than its relevance to that historical event. However, I found the book to be exceptionally boring and slow in its beginning, so much so that after about a fourth of the book I put it down expecting not to finish it (very unusual for me). The characters were dimensionless, stereotypical, and uninteresting, and at many points the characters' psychology and the central sexual/romantic liaison struck me as irritatingly inauthentic for the period depicted. However, I did return to the book--skipping right to the assassination scene itself since the first part was so damned boring. From this point forward, the action got really engrossing and suspenseful, and the book became one that I couldn't put down. The action was very well paced, though the main characters' personalities and their relationship to each other still seemed inauthentic--or at least the book left me wondering how much of these depictions were rooted in fact and how much they were pure fiction. It would be nice for the author to clarify which elements or dimensions of the story are historically known and which are his own invention. In the end, it was a book that was very memorable, one that really impacted me insofar as it has changed my notions of this who this couple was. But again, I wish I knew whether my new understanding of their personalities and their relationship--and of the assassination's apparently lasting dominance over their lives--derives from an accurate or a purely imaginative portrayal of the characters.

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elegant psychological study of an obscure historical figure 19. M�rz 1999

Von belsei@buffnet.net

Format:Taschenbuch

Henry and Clara was an elegant psychological study of an obscure historical figure. One gets a true sense of the emotional traumas soldiers suffered during the Civil War and the effects of post traumatic stress disorder on their lives. Of particular interest is thesubtle way in which the reader learns about the social pressures of the times and how those pressures eventually lead to Henry's psychosis and the family tragedy.

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