Word: brien
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...most moving and instructive anecdote appears at the end of the book, when O’Brien describes the death of the Adams’ only daughter, also named Louisa, in 1812. The baby’s protracted and painful death from dysentery and fever, over a period of four months, engendered a profound and lasting depression in her mother, who began to pine for death herself: “I feel that all my wishes center in the grave,” she wrote in her diary. To this haunting episode, O’Brien attributes Louisa?...
...Adams in Winter: a Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon,” against the background of Adams’ troubled marriage and peripatetic life as a diplomatic wife, British historian Michael O’Brien marshals an impressive array of sources in order to recreate Mrs. Adams’ journey across Europe. The result is an agreeable mix of biography, travelogue, and historical narrative—a book whose form is as hybrid as its subject. O’Brien describes Louisa Catherine Adams as “migrant, transnational, bicultural, bilingual,” and proposes...
...harrowed battlefield of Leipzig—scene of the biggest battle in Europe before World War I—where human skeletons are still strewn on the charred ground among scraps of leather and smashed muskets. And into this chronological narrative of life on the road, O’Brien skillfully weaves a series of telling anecdotes from Louisa Catherine Adams’s experience as a wife, mother, and American expatriate in Europe...
...Brien sensitively profiles the relationship between Mrs. Adams and her husband, who became the sixth president of the United States a decade after Louisa made her journey through Europe. For most of his career, John Quincy Adams was deeply involved in his recreational study of the classics, of “Tacitus and Cicero, Massillon and Madame de Stael, the Bible and Milton”—often to the detriment of his relationship with his wife. Ever since their courtship and marriage in 1797, his bookishness and introversion had sat uncomfortably with his wife’s disposition...
...delicate task with the Tonight Show relaunch: making an event of something that viewers were watching less than a year ago without too many awkward reminders of what came between. But no one can say Leno isn't comfortable in his new-old job. As opposed to Conan O'Brien--who reveled in stagy awkwardness--Leno is betting that America will respond to a show that's comfortable, familiar and pretty much unchanged...