Word: prescott
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Harvard looked set to breeze in third for the meet, when the Tigers, led by newcomer Anne Prescott, blew by the rest of the boats to edge out the Crimson...
...even Fried's own history seems to substantiate Prescott's claim that contemporary America is a fallen world, at odds with its ideal past. A large part of the book's bite comes, in fact, from a half-humorous debunking of out historical myths: Emerson got most of his ideas from his Unitarian cohorts, Fried smirkingly insinuates, and Benjamin ("Early to bed, early to rise") Franklin never rose until noon. More substantively, it's hard to detect any real difference between, for example, the imperialism for which Julian chides the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Stuart Rantoul Prescott's glorious...
...endpoint of The Prescott Chronicles is puzzling, the journey there has its compensations. Not as consistently engrossing as the finest historical novels. The Prescott Chronicles does occasionally attain to a plotted intensity. Each section of the book consists of the leavings of one particular family scion (there are, interestingly, no women represented, perhaps because women were not in a position to make the kind of political history Fried is concerned with. (Each is written in a genre particular to the times and events it describes.) Samuels Book of Confessions is complemented by the journals of Basil Litchflied Prescott, transcendentalist...
...most successful sections are those which mange to interweave the personal with the political. The entry for Samuel Prescott, for exampel, tells the perhaps n ot untypical story of one Puritan's growing tolerance for free expression, resulting in part from his own foray into sexual philandering. The sexual peccadilloes of Basil Litchfiled--who lives with a half-crazed wife and hides his homosexual yearnings from his Unitarian colleagues--also sustain dramatic interst...
Other sections suffer, however, from a lack of narrative development, or an overemphasis on the explicitly political. Andrew Prescott's to his sister, for example, seem no more than standard historical accounts, from a radical perspective, of America's staggering towards independence. A frightening glimpse of the imperialist mind in its heyday, Stuart Rantoul's letters to Teddy Roosevelt have strikingly little literary merit...