House of Abraham

President Lincoln's in-laws were all Confederates--and such an embarrassment. Newspapers used the huge family's Rebel antics in anti-Lincoln rhetoric. Reports made Mary Todd's brother David infamous as the cruel warden of a Southern prison who kicked the dead bodies of the Union captives who had died from his neglect. This biography takes full advantage of Michael Prichard's narrative skills: rich vocabulary, clever turns of phrase, and the sleazy details of unsavory relatives described to perfection. Prichard's distinct voice fades into the background as he paints the unattractive and often humorous verbal portraits of the extended First Family of the Civil War. Michael Prichard's fans will hear him at his best. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 3, 2007
Divided families make the stuff of drama. When the divided family is Abraham Lincoln's, its divisions are metaphors for the nation's own collapse. With a skilled and pleasing pen, Berry tells the tangled story of the sad and often painful element of Lincoln's life that deepened his understanding of the nation's travails. Lincoln was closer to his wife's large clan—she had 13 siblings—than to his own. Originally from Kentucky, the Todds had members in both the North and South and backed both the Union and the Confederacy. Four of them, including Lincoln, died as a result of the conflict. Some were honorable and others scoundrels, some were easygoing and others problematic. Berry, an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia, calls many of them “miserable,” and their family a “wreck.” He manages to tell the story of each Todd with full sympathy yet critical distance, and adds another level of understanding to the president who would “bind the nation's wounds.” Finally, he rescues the Southern Todds from their obscurity. The result is a fast-paced, sobering story, never better told, of the pains of a clan and their significance for American history. 8 pages of b&w photos.

February 4, 2008
Historian Berry takes Abraham Lincoln's "house divided" to heart, detailing the president's own family fissions. The Todds, his wife's family, were longtime slaveholders, and their sympathies were split between the Union and the Confederacy during the war. The well-regarded Prichard reads Berry's tale of the Todds with long, significant pauses and a stentorian rigor. A taste of the old South's molasses creeps into Prichard's voice and into the respites he takes in the middle of a sentence, which often linger one beat longer than might be expected. Having recorded more than 450 audiobooks, Prichard knows that little tricks like these keep listeners on their toes, happily waiting for the next word or the next sentence. By stretching time out like taffy, Prichard manages to make it flow faster than it otherwise would. Simultaneous release with the Houghton Mifflin hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 3).

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