Word: lateralism
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Although it takes Huck three days to establish that Tom’s fantasies aren’t true, later in the novel Huck can immediately figure out how to convincingly lie to other characters. In one instance, Huck fabricates an entire story to convince a ferryman to lead a rescue party to save several people trapped in a sinking riverboat. Yet later, Huck is not able to figure out that the criminals called The Duke and The King are not real royalty. Huck’s capacity to understand and speak the truth seems to change in every scene...
...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’s determination to complete her epic journey alone, three years later. But it also allows the author to complicate his impression of John Quincy Adams, who for once grew distracted from politics, and grieved deeply for his daughter. O’Brien quotes from a letter written to his mother, Abigail Adams, in which he describes the child?...
...century motel where one slept in a cubicle with waist-height boards for walls. Through Mrs. Adams’ eyes, we see evidence of the Napoleonic conflict. In Eastern Prussia, she is alarmed by the thinned population, by clusters of unprotected women on the streets, and half-burned houses. Later, she passes the 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...
...granted by her upbringing in the “swirling world” of London. After meeting Quincy Adams in England, she had offended him by laughing at his earnestness, “as fashionable young women in London did at awkward young men from Massachusetts.” Later, they would fall out over Louisa’s desire to wear rouge in order to attenuate the “cadaverous” pallor of her complexion, which offended her husband’s puritan sensibilities. He insisted on wiping her face himself. She reflected in her memoir later...
...informative and diverting—if not engrossing—read. Towards the end of the journey, O’Brien describes the provenance of his most valuable source, Louisa Catherine Adams’ own memoir of the journey, which she wrote down twenty years later, in 1836. Having encountered numerous obstacles to remembering, she was the first to concede its unreliability: “those who may read this memento mori, must endeavor to extract light from the chaos which lies before them; and I wish them joy of the trouble...