Review
This book is fiction. Much written about President Harding needs further examination, as so much myth has grown up. That said, this is a delightful book and much of it does have a basis in hard historical fact. The author has written a completely charming and engrossing tale. So despite my reluctance to further any more mythology about President Harding, I can say this book is engaging and worth a read as a work of beautifully crafted fiction.
— James D. Robenalt,
author of The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War
Summary
Monday, November 25, 1963. President John F. Kennedy is buried in Arlington. During the stillness of this momentous day, Tristan Tecumseh Hamilton begins a long look back at his life and times, and at the life and times of his neighbor and fellow townsman, President Warren G Harding - who died mysteriously in San Francisco forty years before. Throughout this final week of November 1963, the assassination and burial of President Kennedy becomes the mirror through which the now aging Tristan views the storied and long buried past as it rises all around him. Power and love, ambition and loyalty, war and the devotion to home - these universal themes weave through the rich and intricate tapestry of this magesterial American epic that encompasses the world from the vantage of home.
About the Author
Born and raised in Marion, Ohio in the middle decades of the 20th century, Vincent Nicolosi grew up in an era when Harding lore, like Indian lore, was still in the air. History and legends lingered on, rumors too. These he absorbed from stories told by those who knew and mixed with Warren and Florence Harding, who shook hands with Babe Ruth, dined with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, exchanged points of view with Henry Ford, and with those who labored to build the town, run the railroads and construct the steam shovels that dug the Panama Canal. As a paperboy, he daily followed in the footsteps of the great socialist Norman Thomas, who walked the same route delivering The Marion Star seventy years before, founded in the 1880s by Warren G. Harding. Vincent Nicolosi's own life has led him to far-flung places, including, years ago, the mountains of northern Nicaragua. Today he makes his home in the eastern United States.
