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Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War
Maybe someday
42
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
31/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Steve Inskeep
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Date:
January 14, 2020
The host of NPR's Morning Edition tells the story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States and thus became America's first great political couple.
What The Reviewers Say
Throughout this volume are vivid descriptions of the American landscape.
... absorbing.
Certainly, [John Frémont] presents an awkward, and anticlimactic, subject for a biographer—a failure as a Civil War commander, after contesting Lincoln’s 1864 re-election, the balance of his life was a fortune-draining diminuendo of failed business ventures that left him and Jessie destitute. Rather than vilifying or lionizing John, Inskeep smartly situates him in his context. And here he yields his true significance: as a cipher for the forces at large in U.S. society.
... revelatory.
