FairTax or House of Abraham

FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

Author: Neal Boortz

In 2005, firebrand radio talk show host Neal Boortz and Georgia congressman John Linder created The FairTax Book, presenting the American public with a bold new plan designed to eliminate federal taxes and the IRS, jump-start the U.S. economy, bring back lost industries and jobs, and recapture billions of untaxed dollars currently hoarded by criminal and offshore businesses. Their book became an immediate #1 New York Times bestseller, igniting a powerful grassroots tax reform movement that's spreading like wildfire across our nation.

Now, three years later, the authors are back to answer the outspoken and misinformed critics of their innovative proposal. Offering stunning new insights not covered in the original book, FairTax: The Truth debunks the negative myths and gross misrepresentations of this groundbreaking idea. The FairTax plan is simple, brilliant, and it will work—enabling you to keep all the money in your paycheck; eliminating the fraud, hassle, and waste of our current system; and revolutionizing the way America pays for itself.

Book review: RealAge Makeover or Stretching

House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War

Author: Stephen Berry

A rising star among historians charts the fortunes of a family shattered by the Civil War---Mary Todd Lincoln's family---and their surprising impact on how Lincoln fought that war.

The Washington Post - Michael F. Bishop

House of Abraham is a compelling chronicle of a unique American family, and sheds new light on the domestic pressures endured by the Civil War president.

Publishers Weekly

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. (Nov. 5)

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Margaret Heilbrun - Library Journal

Placing the Civil War President in the context of his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and her many siblings and half-siblings, Berry (history, Univ. of Georgia) shows the Todds as metaphor for the nation: ripped asunder, never to be the same. His demystification of Lincoln's depression is acute, albeit his use of Joshua Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy) as a source expands on an error relating to Shakespeare. Lincoln knew the Bard well, which makes such errors by Lincoln scholars a pity. Berry covers new ground on the Todds with brio-and with a rather rushed finish. For public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ7/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

A compelling collective biography of the Kentucky in-laws of Abraham Lincoln. Berry (History/Univ. of Georgia; All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South, 2003, etc.) brings to vibrant life Lexington aristocrats never before studied in depth by Lincoln biographers-all the more remarkable given that before the war, the rising politico was closer to them than to his own family, and that in the conflict their divisions caused him no end of heartbreak and scandal. Mary Todd Lincoln and her 13 siblings symbolized the war's divisive toll on families-six sided with the Union, eight with the Confederacy. Four either became casualties themselves or had husbands who were-most notably Lincoln. With swift strokes, Berry sketches the broad characteristics of the clan (intelligence, quick tempers, alcoholism, litigiousness, ambition), as well as the individual traits that led them to nearly every major event and theater of the conflict. The children or their spouses included a Confederate brigadier general killed at Chickamauga; a Richmond prison commandant accused of mistreating Union soldiers; a talented rebel surgeon also charged with prison abuse; a brother-in-law who tried to blackmail Lincoln so he could retain an appointive Illinois post; and another sister who not only showed up in Mississippi at Jefferson Davis's inauguration as Confederate president but likely committed treason. Berry is especially shrewd in analyzing the Lincolns's marriage, showing how Abraham's pity for Mary's blind rages often fed her desire to punish him for this feeling. Berry also sensitively examines how the president's anguish over his in-laws led him to transform the shopworn metaphor of familyinto transcendent rhetoric that united the nation in a new "House of Abraham" built on freedom and forgiveness. A riveting account of the bluegrass bluebloods who embodied Lincoln's prewar notion of a "house divided" more than he ever expected. Agent: Andrew Wylie/Wylie Agency

Table of Contents:

The Todd Family vi Introduction ix
1. Bluegrass Beginnings 1
2. Scattered 24
3. 1861: Divided We Fall 53
4. 1862: "Blood Galore" 97
5. 1863: The Death of Absalom 131
6. 1864–65: A Whole People 157 Epilogue 182 Acknowledgments 193 Notes 196 Index 241