Mailbox Monday, May 2, 2011

Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with April’s spot being at MariReads.

WELL! After two weeks of NO BOOKS in my mailbox, I had a 3 book mailbox this week. Very happy that the books arrived as quickly as they did! So here’s what I got:

     As a child, former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone was told that his father died in a submarine disaster in the North Atlantic. But what he now learns stuns him: His father’s sub was a secret nuclear vessel lost on a highly classified mission beneath the ice shelves of Antarctica. Twin sisters Dorothea Lindauer and Christl Falk are also determined to find out what became of their father, who died on the same submarine – and they know something Malone doesn’t: Inspired by strange clues discovered in Charlemagne’s tomb, the Nazis explored Antarctica before the Americans. Now Malone discovers that cryptic journals penned in “the language of heaven,” conundrums posed by an ancient historian, and his father’s ill-fated voyage are all tied to a revelation of immense consequence for human-kind. As Malone embarks on a dangerous quest with the sisters, he will finally confront the shocking truth of his father’s death and the distinct possibility of his own.

     Burr is a portrait of perhaps the most complex and misunderstood of the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1933, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. Burr retains much of his political influence if not the respect of all. And he is determined to tell his own story. As his amanuensis, he chooses Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a young New York City journalist, and together they explore both Burr’s past and the continuing political intrigues of the still young United States.

     In this profoundly moving work of epic proportion and intense human sympathy, Abraham Lincoln is observed by his loved ones, his rivals, and his future assassins. Seen by his wife, Mary, who adores him even as she is going made … by the Machiavellian Secretary of State Seward, who begins by scorning LIncoln and ends by worshipping him … by Lincoln’s rival, Salmon P. Chase, and his beautiful daughter, Kate … by David Herold, the druggist’s clerk at the center of the plot that will eventually take Lincoln’s life … and by the twenty-three-year-old presidential secretary, John Hay, who comes to know Lincoln intimately during his four years in the White House, Lincoln emerges as a complex and towering figure who presided over some of the most divisive and dangerous years in American history. In a brilliantly realized, vividly imagined work of fiction, Gore Vidal gives us a portrait of America’s great president that is at once intimate and public, stark and complex, and that will become for future generations the living Lincoln, the definitive Lincoln.