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Kati Marton's Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History (Pantheon Books; 414 pages; $25), provides a deft survey of a dozen First Couples, from Edith and Woodrow Wilson to Laura and George Bush. Marton mixes some good history with a lot of pop marriage psychology to show the part that patience, tolerance, insight, determination, sex and occasionally even love have played in the pursuit and exercise of presidential power. Without the ladies, she argues, many of the men for whom Hail to the Chief has been played probably would have ended up as peanut merchants, obscure lawyers...
First among Marton's First Couples are Edith and Woodrow Wilson. Edith Bolling Galt was a widow when she married Wilson in what was judged to be unseemly haste since his first wife had died little more than a year earlier. Galt was handsome, fearless, possessive and responsive to Wilson's fevered sexual impulses. Whisper of the times: "What did Mrs. Galt do when the President asked her to marry him? She fell out of bed." Their marriage was "the greatest love story of the modern presidency," Marton writes, her opinion bolstered by the collection of 250 eloquent, if sometimes...
BOOK The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton. "What a few Greeks wrote and said 2,500 years ago still lives. Astounding...
...HANG LOOSE: PW is overwhelmed by "Fred & Edie" by Jill Dawson (Welcome Rain; September), giving it a starred review. "Dawson?s third novel strikingly and elegantly blends fact and fiction in a reimagining of the events surrounding the spectacular 1922 London trial of Edith Thompson and her lover, Frederick Bywaters, who were convicted and hanged for murdering Edith?s husband, Percy...Gripping, surprising and beautiful. FORECAST: This title was a finalist for the Whitbread Prize; a film (?Another Life?) based on the same incidents premiered in the U.K. and is scheduled for U.S. release this year. Though set 80 years...
...EDITH IN THE BUNKER: Edith Wilson ran the executive branch, if not the whole government, during Woodrow Wilson's last year and a half in office, after he had a debilitating stroke. Former NYT reporter Phyllis Lee Levin tells the story of the Wilson presidency in "Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House" (Scribner; October 11). PW gives it a glowing starred review. "A beautifully written and impeccably researched account...These issues have been discussed in more than one previous history, but no other writer has gone as deeply into the archives to marshall the strong proof that Levin presents...