Author: Garry Wills File Type: epub With a new preface An irreverent [and] entertaining portrait of JFK, the Camelot mystique, and the politics of charisma (The Christian Science Monitor). Described by the New York Times as a sort of intellectual outlaw, Garry Wills takes on the romantic myths surrounding the Kennedy clan in this thought-provoking examination of electoral politics and the power of image in America. Wills argues that the much-admired dynasty, beginning with patriarch Joe Kennedy, created a corrupt climate where appearances were more important than reality, truth was discarded when it wasnt convenient, and an assortment of devoted loyalists sacrificed integrity for the sake of reflected glory. Touching upon topics ranging from the manipulation of the PT-109 story in the media to the authorship of Profiles in Courage to the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis to persistent rumors of extramarital affairs, Wills offers a persuasive look not only at President John F. Kennedy and his brothers Robert and Edward, but also at the bubble that existed around them and lured in some of the best and brightest of the era. From the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and Why I Am a Catholic, The Kennedy Imprisonment is a brilliant and troubling study of the Kennedy era in American politics (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

Author: Henry James File Type: epub The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classicsseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics ull All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works. lulWidely regarded as Henry Jamess greatest masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady features one of the authors most magnificent heroines Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American who becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe. As the story begins, Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, has turned down two eligible suitors. Her cousin, who is dying of tuberculosis, secretly gives her an inheritance so that she can remain independent and fulfill a grand destiny, but the fortune only leads her to make a tragic choice and marry Gilbert Osmond, an American expatriate who lives in Florence. Outwardly charming and cultivated, but fundamentally cold and cruel, Osmond only brings heartbreak and ruin to Isabels life. Yet she survives as she begins to realize that true freedom means living with her choices and their consequences. Richly complex and nearly aesthetically perfect, The Portrait of a Lady brilliantly portrays the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old. Gabriel Brownstein is the author of a collection of stories_The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt 3W_which won the 2002 PENHemingway Award. His essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the New Leader, Scribners British Writers, and on Nerve.com.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. From Gabriel Brownsteins Introduction to The Portrait of a LadyThe Portrait of a Lady is often discussed as a novel of manners, a sociological study of the contrasts in mores and styles of Americans and Europeans. Its also described as a psychological novel, charting the complex interplay between the minds of its major characters and exploring relentlessly and finely the consciousness of its heroine, Isabel. But these characterizations, while not entirely mistaken, obscure a central characteristic of the novel The Portrait of a Lady is a fairy tale, or as James put it in the 1906 preface, a fable. With whatever authority he presents the psyches and social milieus of his Europeans and Americans and Europeanized Americans, and however carefully observed the localesand the authority and care are absolutethe project of The Portrait of a Lady is about as close to a work of social science as it is to a conventional potboiler. Americans and Europeans, in the novel, are types As Leon Edel, Jamess great biographer and critic, has it, In James fiction, Americans are often presented as if they still possess the innocence of Eden and furthermore, it is striking how often the adjective corrupt precedes the word Europe (article in Scribners American Writers, Vol. 2, pp. 320-323). As they appear in The Portrait of a Lady, these representatives of the old and new worlds are rendered vividly, and they may feel to the reader momentarily real, but in the end they are figures in a novelists dreams and meditations they are as conceptual as they are concrete. Similarly, American girl is not a category of mind or state of consciousness it is a kind of representational ideal. In the authors terms, the phrase American girl is almost redundant. Both the words conjure innocence and (in their way) beauty. Both words also auger doom. If, as Edel argues, America is an Eden, then a fall will come, as surely as a girl will become a woman or die. The phrase American girl also carries with it a hint of contradiction, a fight between the two words While an American is liberated, a girl is subject to all kinds of boundaries and limits. American girl, then, is a phrase that conjures a story, a cheerful two words that together gather storm clouds. American girls are doubly doomed among the limits of European society an American girl going to Europe is a pure white lamb bound to be ruined. The Portrait of a Lady bears the details and precision of psychological and social realism, but the novel is structured like a kind of old-fashioned legend. We have an ordinary girl, Isabel, who on venturing into Europe becomes a sort of princess, an heiress related to her uncle, the banker Daniel Touchett, who in his kindness, power, and benevolence is as good as a king. Once in this strange land, Isabel is wooed by two Princes Charming, paragons of American and British manhood Caspar Goodwood, the inventor-athlete-businessman, and Lord Warburton, the nobleman-politician-reformer. But she marries neither and is instead entranced by Madame Merle, a kind of witchan evil sorceress of society and good mannerswho marries her off to the sterile dilettante, as Ralph Touchett puts it, Gilbert Osmond, an ogre of high aesthetics, who in the end does not find Isabels beauty up to the mark. This story is beauty and the beast in its most primitive form the princess enslaved by a monster. But the monster in The Portrait of a Lady is a monster of aesthetics Osmond is a painter, a collector of fine things, a disparager of vulgarity. And Isabel is no ordinary beauty She has beauty based in character, in potentiality, in innocence, and in liberty of mindin her being an American and a girl. This novel is not just a beautiful story it is a story about beauty, a story in which the destruction of beauty is threatened by beautys great admirer. The book opens with a meditation on a kind of perfect scene, Ralph and Daniel Touchett, along with Lord Warburton, taking tea on the lawn of Gardencourt. The time of day is aestheticized, the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon, which the narrator tells us could be only an eternity of pleasure. The house is aestheticized, even its brick face, with the complexion of which time and the weather had played all sorts of pictorial tricks, only, however, to improve and refine it. Daniel Touchett, for his part, has an aesthetic passion for Gardencourt, and even Touchetts beautiful collie dog gets into the rapture, watching the masters face almost as tenderly as the master took in the still more magisterial physiognomy of the house. This sort of highly aestheticized contemplation and pictorial scene-setting is replete throughout the novel, notably at the introduction to Osmonds villa in Florence, where the narrator describes a small group that might have been described by a painter as composing well. The windows of Osmonds place, we are told, are extremely architectural. Osmonds beard is cut in the manner of the portraits of the sixteenth century, and he is described as a gentleman who studied style. Not only are the settings beautiful, but these beauties are contemplated by a narrator whose precision and delicacy and aesthetic passions are rivaled only by his characters.